Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

That's only counting the ones that are legal and registered. I would suspect 30% more are not. many are "granffather" guns inherited from a time before registation.
 

Wow. Considering that communities like my church are likely only to have maybe 1 out of 100 having even a bb gun and thereby seriously skewing the numbers, SOMEBODY out there has a lotta guns.
 

I own a shotgun, which was handed down to me by my father. It's currently hanging out at my in-laws' place, because if I were to hunt, I'd probably start there first.

My father-in-law owns several guns. My brother-in-law, my wife's brother, owns several guns. My brother-in-law, my sister's husband, owns more than a dozen.

Farmers all. Rural all. That's probably where the numbers come in. Throw in the folks in ER's home neck of the woods, where they still hunt squirrels for lunch that afternoon, and you can see (OK, I'm just razzin' ER and his "hillbilly" upbringin'; I often envision Jed and Granny sittin' on the front porch, wavin' at ER as he walks barefooted to school in town.)
 

No bare feet.

It is a true fact, though, that I could tie mu shoes, or any bow, until fifth grade -- 'cause I never wore anything but black Acme cowboy boots.

I was finally shamed into learnin' only when I had to go to a funeral, Mama left me in the care of an aunt, and she kept wondering why I was takin' so long: 'Cause I was sittin' on the bed, all dressed up except for my dress shoes, which I was starin' at, not knowing how to tie. My aunt gave me a kind but hard time, and I learnt then real fast.

BTW: I am know as a flatlander, bein' a frequenter of the Arkansas River bottoms. Most of my friends, however, are hill dwellers, and I used to know them hills as well as the bottoms!
 

Now this is a great story to illustrate how facts and truth differ. Fact:There are 90 guns per 100 people in the U.S.. Fact: There are 46 guns per 100 people in Switzerland.
Thus the U.S. has a more heavily armed citizenry that Switzerland. America is twice as well armed as Switzerland!

Not really.
There are tens of thousands of gun owners that own 10-20-30-50-or a 100+ guns in the United States. My brother-in-law owns 12 guns. I own 2 that will shoot and two more that might could if I fixed them.

However in Switzerland every, that's EVERY, houshold owns at the very least an assault rifle. Not a hunting rifle mind you. Now that is an assault weapon, a 550 Sig fully automatice machine gun with ammo provided. Every able bodied man over 18 is trained to use that weapon and many more.
This is a legal requirement of every male citizen in Switzerland. So while America's guns are unequally distributed among the population and geographically, Switzerland's weapons are distributed to every place someone lives and are ready for use.
Now, who is the most heavily armed nation?
 

I think you’re over-egging the pudding a little there, Dr L. Have a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1566715.stm

It is not a legal requirement for every male to posses a fully automatic assault rifle as you seem to imply, the actuality is somewhat less dramatic.

Nevertheless there is a valid point there; the Swiss situation is I think what your founding fathers imagined when they penned the second amendment; to quote the conclusion of the BBC article, “firearms are strictly connected to a sense of collective responsibility. From an early age Swiss men and women associate weaponry with being called to defend their country.”

So the difference in gun-crime rates between Switzerland and the US is a result of ‘society’ and its oft-touted ills. The guns are a symptom, not necessarily a cause.

That said, ER quotes above the phrase, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” I can’t hear that phrase now without being reminded of Eddie Izzard’s rejoinder that, “monkeys kill people too… if you give them guns.” It rather makes the point about how much more dangerous a gun makes a man. Guns may not be to blame for your ills, but they make the taking of life casually easy. If every gun in America magically disappeared overnight (to be replaced with the non-firearm weapon of your choice, if you wish!) your crime-related death rate would drop dramatically at the same time.
 

OK, I took this test and here are the results:

1. Orthodox Quaker (100%)
2. Eastern Orthodox (90%)
3. Roman Catholic (90%)
4. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (90%)

Not surprising to me, except I think some of the questions sort of boxed me in to an answer that I didn't exactly agree with. It just happened to be the only one that was closer to my views than the others.

-- Three desks down, one over
 

The issue with guns, for me at least, has never been about how many, or their use. The issue with guns is that we need to be honest and make distinctions between law-abiding citizens who own a shotgun and/or a hunting rifle and/or a registered handgun (if your state so requires) and the ubiquity of assault weapons, machine guns, and other assorted military-type weapons, too often distributed by organized crime to minority communities. Along with an ethic that approves of an individual killing another individual for invading his or her home, rather than calling for police help after securing oneself, we have nothing less than a recipe for disaster. We approve of violence as a society, it is, after all, as American as cherry pie. We hype the threats to our persons and properties and the necessity to shoot first, ask questions later to the point of sinful absurdity.

I grew up in a household that had several firearms - a couple shotguns and a couple rifles (including a Winchester 1889 .30-.30, lever action, like John Wayne used in the movies; my father could shoot that from his hip and take out the center of a tuna can from 25 yards when he was in his late-50's) - and learned to shoot at a NY State approved hunter safety class. Having said that, I would no more own a firearm than I would castrate myself. I need no such lethal toy to (a) prove my manhood; or (b) protect myself or my family. The latter sentiment is a dangerous lie we tell ourselves. It would be far more likely that one of my children would either accidentally shoot themselves or a friend than the weapon would be used in self-defense. That risk being far greater than some horrible individual entering my house to do me or my family bodily or property harm, I refuse to take it.

I have nothing against anyone who owns firearms, stores them properly, and uses them for the purposes for which they were intended - shotgun and small-caliber rifles for hunting, and the occasional trap shoot. The problem is there are people who have a pathological fixation on military weapons whose sole purpose is the killing of other human beings. Those and handguns, also designed for the sole purpose of destroying human life, are a threat and I see no reason why a human being would want to own one. If one is a collector, remove the firing mechanism, and display it safely (behind locked safety glass), rather than let it sit unattended in a bedside table drawer or kitchen cabinet with a full magazine. My daughter has a friend whose parents keep a handgun in a bedside table drawer, and we will not allow her, under any circumstances, to enter that house, because that is an accident waiting to happen, and I do not want it to be either my child shooting another, or my child getting shot.

If you want a hobby, try stamp-collecting.
 

Liam said: "I think you’re over-egging the pudding a little there, Dr L. Have a look at:..."

Great phrase.

Liam, what I said in that regard was, "Every able bodied man over 18 is trained to use that weapon and many more.
This is a legal requirement of every male citizen in Switzerland."

We were talking about how "well armed" a country was.

Now if you want to talk about how stupid a country is with their firarms, lets look at deaths by firearms per capita.

Rank Countries Amount (top to bottom)
#1 South Africa: 0.719782 per 1,000 people
#2 Colombia: 0.509801 per 1,000 people
#3 Thailand: 0.312093 per 1,000 people
#4 Zimbabwe: 0.0491736 per 1,000 people
#5 Mexico: 0.0337938 per 1,000 people
#6 Belarus: 0.0321359 per 1,000 people
#7 Costa Rica: 0.0313745 per 1,000 people
#8 United States: 0.0279271 per 1,000 people
#9 Uruguay: 0.0245902 per 1,000 people
#10 Lithuania: 0.0230748 per 1,000 people

Swizerland is #19 Switzerland: 0.00534117 per 1,000 people by the way

Actually I was amazed that the U.S. was only #8.

The U.K. was only #32: 0.00102579 per 1,000 people
 

Liam, that is a GREAT rejoinder!

“monkeys kill people too… if you give them guns.”

If I lived in a crime-ridden urban area, I might feel differently. But I don't. And this is a BIG country -- and I live right in the middle of it.

The occasional accidents involving gun owners, to me, is a fair exchange for the constitutional right.

Just like high crime is almost always a fair trade for liberty in general.
 

174 accidental gun deaths in U.S. in year 2000 for children 0-18.
 

Guns have been in every member of my family's house as far back as family geneology has been able to trace. My first personal memory of guns was my Dad showing us his hunting guns and telling us to never to touch them, because they were always loaded. They weren't ALWAYS loaded, but he wanted us to always treat them as they were. This, however, was not much of a deterrent to me.

Because it wasn't long after that, my Dad left me (age 5) and my little sister in the back of the car while he ran inside a little airport in Missouri to pay for his pilot lessons, and one of his guns was in the floorboard, and, it was loaded. My sister asked me to shoot it, so I did. It was only by sheer luck or divine guidance I didn't kill anyone in the group of people in the parking lot where the gun was arbitrarily aimed at. I only shot out a car window.

My Dad paid for the car window on the spot, while me and my sister stayed ducked down in the backseat, and took us home. I have rarely seen him quite so shook up and he kept his guns far, far away from me after that.

Years later, I was on my way to my Grannie's house in eastern Oklahoma, and I was running late. I didn't get there until after midnight. I let myself in and called her name a couple of times. She didn't wake up, so I decided to let her sleep and just go onto bed. I went in the bathroom to get ready for bed and when I came out, I was staring down the business end of her shotgun. I'm so glad she waited to see who was in the bathroom before she pulled the trigger.

A couple years after that, I was again staring down the wrong end of a gun in the hands of my drunken, angry (ex) husband. Somehow he had got it in his head after spending a day with my Dad, I had actually been cheating on him. I was eight months pregnant at the time.

If you want to keep a gun in your home, I can relate to that. Everyone of my siblings, my Mom, my aunts,uncles and cousins has some sort of firearm in their house. I just can't do it. I'm the only one in my family who doesn't have a gun in the house. But guns just scare the crap out of me.

Crystal
 

I can see why, and I don't blame you.
 

Hey Dr L, the numerical ranking doesn't really display the difference from one country to another. Try plotting those rates out on a chart and seeing where the US sits compared to other 'First World' countries. The fact that you were topped only by the likes of Colombia and Zimbabwe (both vitually engaged in Civil War!) is hardly something to be proud of. Rather it is something you should be striving vigourously to remedy!
 

Irony, doesn't come across well in print. Especially if the reader isn't looking for it. :)
Liam, I was being "ironical" about our ranking.
 

Doh! And there was me thinking that Americans didn't understand irony! ;o)
 

With what I've seen being broadcast from the White House lately, who can blame you.
 

"Guns don't kill people. Husbands that come home early do." ~ Larry the Cable Guy