Having grown up in the very deepest part of the Deep South as a strongly conservative Republican, and having spent 20 years as part of a strongly conservative organization - the military - I think I can see both sides...and you know what? If your gun is not yet drawn, and the guy with a knife is within ten feet of you, he will kill you dead before you have a chance to draw your gun.
That, and if a guy has a gun and really wants to kill you, you're dead. It doesn't matter how big or bad your gun is, and it doesn't matter how good you are with it - if he's got the drop on you, you're dead.
Don't get me wrong - there's some times that having a gun is a good thing...like when there's somebody breaking into your house. Problem is,
a gun-owning household is many times more likely to have its guns used in a suicide, homicide, or accidental shooting than it is to have those guns used in self-defense, and
women are several times more likely to be killed by her husband in a domestic abuse situation if he is a gun owner.
This doesn't mean that guns are always a bad thing - I grew up with guns, and I know how to respect them. But kids get curious when they find guns, and men all too often reach for the most effective weapon at hand when they're in a domestic dispute...hence the statistics. However 'okay' we may think it may be, the overall statistics - here and overseas - don't lie.
BUT Pandora's outta the box and she ain't gettin' back in. We simply can't take all the guns away from everyone - heck, there's nearly 80 guns owned by the civilian populace as by the police and military combined. But what we can do is to keep from allow nutcases from legally purchasing guns - which requires a background check for ALL firearm purchases - and enable the government to stop the gun-runners - which requires registration of all firearms. This isn't tyranny any more than it is for Switzerland or Israel, both of which have much more stringent gun-control laws than we do...and Switzerland's been doing just fine for half a millennium, since long before America was even thought about.
But will this happen? No, because there's too many nutcases out there who are Absolutely Sure that the guv'mint's a-comin' for them, that those black helicopters are just over that ridge just a-waitin' to shoot them dead and take the guns from their cold, dead fingers. This is also known as stupidity, because these people are placing their oh-so-precious 'right' (based on an out-of-context reading of the Second Amendment) over the rights of women and children to live. Less than twenty years ago, the NRA was officially for background checks for everyone...but now? The rabid pro-gun nuts just don't get that it's not about - and never was about - their Second Amendment rights. It's about the gun manufacturers convincing them to buy ever more guns and ammo, especially since
gun ownership rate in America has been steadily dropping for thirty years.
Hear that, gun owners? You're being used...and not by the liberals, but by the gun manufacturers and their toady the NRA to buy more guns, that it's somehow patriotic to carry guns all the time...it's almost as if they want you to think they're sacred, somehow holy.
It's said that the Lotto is a tax on the stupid. Anymore, so is NRA membership...which is why
George H.W. Bush and
Adolphus Busch both so publicly quit the NRA - they saw where it was going, how extremist it was becoming, and wanted no part of it.
So should you all.