Glock 22

Why not? Everyone else is talking about them. Yesterday while driving home from work, I realized how old I’m getting by listening to NPR (when my dad listened to this station when I was a teenager I used to role my eyes and say things like: this is so boring! What a brat I was Anyways back on track, on NPR they were talking about gun control, how all of the gun shops in Fresno are almost empty due to people going out and desperately buying up all the ammunition and semi-automatics they can get before the feared government tightening on laws. Even some of my husband’s friends have talked to me about going on ammunition shopping sprees.

To be frank the subject makes my stomach turn. I don’t like guns and have never been around them. My parents didn’t have them growing up and I distinctly remember being a teenager and seeing a gun in a friend’s house and feeling very uneasy. I knew it was something I never wanted to get near. At my highschool graduation in 1998 (this was before Columbine and all of the crazy school shootings), a student threatened to shoot people at the ceremony. He was 18 and promptly arrested and held until after the graduation. Many people in the community complained that his rights were being violated because he hadn’t actually committed a crime, although the police found a ton of firearms in his room. Now I think they would have different reactions given all of the shootings.

If a vote went up tomorrow to make all guns illegal in the US I would be the first to go out and vote YES all guns should be outlawed. But alas, we live in a different world, even if congress does crack down I’m afraid it won’t be hard enough to outlaw all guns. I live in a county with one of the highest concealed weapons permits given, even our neighbor has one. That means that on a daily basis I am passing by armed people on the street (legally armed I might add) and I have no idea.

So then it all comes crashing down when my husband tells me he wants to get a gun. “What?!!? Are you CRAZY???” I ask him. He is from Austria, a country where people don’t carry guns. He told me in Austria he would never consider buying a gun “Why would I?” he said “Nobody else has one so I don’t need one”. But his point is, here in Fresno County every other person has a gun, including people that are criminals. How would we defend ourselves if an armed burglar broke in, or worse, threatened us? Now I’m in a state of confusion. He already took a safety test and is just waiting for me to agree to go down to the store and pick himself out a nice new gun…(He has done military service and has had weapons training so it’s not like he doesn’t know how to handle a gun safely, I just hate guns and all they stand for). I don’t know what will happen next, it’s hard for me to believe it’s come to such a point that I myself might have a gun in my own home.
What are your opinions on guns/gun laws?