Submitted by Alex Birch on Wed, 04/23/2008 - 19:31.
According to the 2006 General Social Survey, which has tracked gun ownership since 1973, 34% of American homes have guns in them. This statistic is sure to surprise many people in cities like San Francisco – as it did me when I first encountered it. (Growing up in Seattle, I knew nobody who owned a gun.)
Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.
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In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling "outraged at something somebody had done." It's easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn't true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don't have guns.
I think the reason for this is pretty obvious: it feels good to be able to protect yourself and your family against intruders and other criminals. We live in a time where the police force cannot control the anarchy and violence on the streets. Humanists whine "but guns kill people" and by saying so, forget that criminals have guns and that they kill, too. We need to be able to defend ourselves against an increasing wave of criminality, because society won't stand up for us anymore.
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Why should this suprise anyone?
I really do get tired of hearing the liberals whine about how awful guns are, how many people they kill and blah blah blah...you can always tell just by hearing them that they probably have never even been around one, they just hear all the horror stories about gang violence and school shootings and the evil Charlton Heston and everything, and have nothing better to do than scapegoat the guns themselves for all of America's crime, they don't even worry about WHY these things happen in our society!
I remember seeing something somewhere about how many cops there really are in the country, turns out it's about 1 police officer for every 300 citizens. I have no idea how accurate that is or how old (might be even worse now) , but it's the cold truth: no matter what they make it sound like, the police can't always be there to babysit us all. (Not to mention that while you're handing over your wallet to some lowlife, the nearest officer is going to be busy arresting someone for reefer or fetching some old ladys cat out of a tree...)
"In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling "outraged at something somebody had done." "
This makes sense to me: while all the humanist liberals are lamenting about the lastest crime wave sweeping your city and "where are the police?!", a sensible gun owner feels a lot safer with a gun than they do with the 2 or 3 cops available that might show up eventually to help if someone breaks in. And rightfully so.
I think it's more of a
I think it's more of a function of the areas where these gun-owners tend to live (small towns and rural areas near nature, as opposed to crowded cities).