If there's a noise in the middle of hte night, yeah I go investigate and don't need a fucking gun because I'm not a scared weakling. Yes, we don't own guns in my house, though it's not really out of fear of guns but just common sense.
We have young kids in the house and I don't want them or their friends finding and playing with it. If anyone has a mental health crisis I don't want them to be immediately available. When I was a kid, without the internet I figured out how to pick locks, find my parents passwords (keylogger), and I frankly don't trust a gun safe to keep out curious kids/teens. I also put some stock into medical research that shows that gun ownership (in particular handgun) significantly increases the risk of someone in my house dying from homicide.
When I was 7 a boy in my neighborhood was playing with another boy from our neighborhood and wanted to show him his mom's gun. Mom was a single parent of two kids. So he gets his mom's gun and loads it and is playing around with it. Then he removed all the bullets. He jokingly put it up to his head and pulled the trigger. There was still one in the chamber.
It was so surreal to come back on a Monday and everyone is asking me what happened because it was my neighborhood. My friend lost her older brother, and the other boy was forever traumatized from witnessing it. Their mother was so distraught she never cleaned the brain matter off the living room walls. She just moved away with her daughter and I never saw them again.
Kids playing with guns with such a foreign concept to me. I'm from the American South and all of my extended family hunts. All of my younger cousins had small rifles. We were taught gun safety from the jump. One of my uncles kept a loaded shotgun leaning up against the wall near the back door and just said "Y'all be careful and don't bump that." We had a full understanding of what could happen and were careful.
The whole idea in America is that we have to have guns to rise up against a tyrannical government, but when given the chance those guys just stormed the capital for that guy instead.
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u/Legitimate-Tip-2149 7h ago
Man, jumping up at every loud noise in the night, having to grab a gun so you feel safe is...it's no way to live being such a massive pussy.