The internet is abuzz with news this morning of a shooting at a school in Connecticut.
As a mom with a child in school this is hard to read about. My heart goes out to everyone involved.
Then my feed started to show a new trend. The "This is why I have a gun" trend. Now I'm not anti-gun, I'm also not gung-ho pro-gun. I realize I live in the south and just about everyone has one (we will too when we have space for a gun cabinet to keep it safely locked up).
But do guns = safety? Or are they giving people a false sense of security?
Guns can be great for protection, hunting or even for sport. However even with a concealed carry permit there are places you can't take guns. You can't always have it with you. And...sadly you can never tell how batshit crazy someone is.
One of the biggest things that scares me as a parent is thinking "what if my son had that mentality?" Can you imagine how a child would interpret "gun = safety" growing up?
Having a gun doesn't suddenly mean you are "safe". Often being too cocky about guns can lead to quite the opposite. Personally I would worry that someone with that mentality would pull a gun in a situation that didn't warrant it. Or that they would pull a gun and hurt someone else.
Be realistic about it. Know how to shoot the weapon and keep practicing. Just realize you can't take it everywhere (at least not legally) and thinking it automatically makes you safe is a fallacy. I have found in my years of knowing gun owners that the most effective ones are the ones who don't announce it to the world. They don't go around saying "I have a gun, I can protect myself." And if you think of it it's like the drunk guy in the bar yelling "I'm good at sex." which usually indicates he doesn't know what the hell he is doing.
Having a gun can help keep you safe. But it doesn't ensure your safety.
It's not that I'm freaked out by people having guns. I'm concerned about the ones who think that having a gun means they are safe from these things.
2 comments:
Guns just make me so nervous. People that carry loaded guns also make me nervous. They spout all the "well, you have to be instructed about safety" crap, but what else is a gun constructed for other than killing?? This whole thing just makes me sick to my stomach.
I think that anything that is going to happen to anyone will happen anyway. There is no way to protect anyone from getting shot. I used to live in a very dangerous place in Brooklyn New York. Then I moved to Harlem N.Y.C. where I lived for 10 years. There were shootouts all the time.
One day the children were coming out of school and a shootout broke out. I didn't see any news trucks out there that day. All I heard were parents telling the shooters to stop shooting. Children were screaming and it was horrible to listen to all of that screaming from my apartment window. It was a three in the afternoon.
I don't think horrible things will stop happening. It's happening all over the place. In good and bad neighborhoods. I don't know what to say about anything any more. I know that change begins with people. I don't think that having a gun for protection is going to help anyone.
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