I don’t understand what point you are trying to make.
I used to live in Kansas and people would ask me why I didn’t get a gun and my response was always: “I don’t need to kill anybody right now.”
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And, in my experience, the people who claim to have never had such really bad moments are often ‘carriers’. People who just don’t suffer from them. Another term for them is oppressive assholes.
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When I took the training course for my permit (to make my Dad happy), I was disappointed in how i didn’t hit the bullseye as much as I’d like. One guy, to cheer me up, took my target and put it on his chest, pointed at the holes and said, “If this were a person, he’d be dead.” Everyone else nodded.
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The only way I’d ever own a gun is in a trusted friend’s safe. Because sometimes LDoBe gets a sad, and a gun makes it so very easy to kill yourself.
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I used this quote in a debate a few days ago. It’s one of my favorites. Plus, the guy who DOES bring the military machine gun with the explosive charges (and a bulldog, because why not) is one of the first to die. By ‘friendly’ fire.
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Libby-lib-lib gun owner here. Also former RSO and former firearms instructor. Sent my NRA card back twenty years ago when I realized what a bunch of rat-patootie pus-gargling coprolites the organization was.
That said, anyone who wants a firearm should have to go through a basic safety course and demonstrate that they understand that it’s not a toy, a punctuation mark, or a badge number starting with “00”. And after that there are some people, like this stupid woman, who should not have guns at all.
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It very much to your credit that you realize this. More than half the firearms deaths in the US are due to suicide, and an awful lot of the “accidental” ones are so-marked because a compassionate medical examiner wants to make sure the bereaved can get insurance money and avoid the stigma of a self-inflicted death in the family. If you’re prone to Bad Thoughts like that you aren’t alone. I hope you find the help you need and the peace you deserve. Good luck.
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Neither the 5.56mm nor most handgun cartridges are “high-powered”. I have seen seven year old girls easily and accurately fire an AR-15
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I have clicked the 
button repeatedly but I can only give one Like.
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Thank you. I hope you tell your story to more people. I think a lot of us need to hear it.
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There are plenty of sporting events which use stock handguns, not specialized mutant-looking target pistols. Don’t have a problem with events like IDPA or IPSC. The people who compete in those would rather die than scratch a magazine by dropping it on the ground 
Outside of that there are almost no circumstances where a handgun is appropriate. But where it is nothing else will do. I don’t have the answers. Nobody has the answers. But the questions are worth pursuing as dispassionately and honestly as possible.
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I apologize if I misinterpreted your remark as a deflection, but I don’t consider suicide to be a relevant asterisk on the chart of “people killed by guns” versus “people killed by cars”, especially if we’re only going to be breaking out the specifics on one side of that comparison. It’s a common practice by gun rights advocates to argue that gun suicides shouldn’t “count” in these kinds of statistics because they’re somehow different than any other kind of gun death. I vehemently disagree with that assertion. Suicide by gun is a public health issue that is just as serious as mass shootings or deadly interstate collisions; trying to make gun death stats look “better” by excluding a huge swath of victims is merely an attempt to brush them under the rug as inconvenient.
As @Ryuthrowsstuff pointed out, suicide attempts involving a gun are extremely likely to succeed (I believe the rate is something like 90%, versus closer to 10% for most other common methods) because of their convenience and extremely high effectiveness. Whether through intent or accident, most other extremely quick and easy ways of killing oneself (such as coal gas ovens) have been phased out of society. Just because the victim and the perpetrator are the same person doesn’t make the death any less tragic, nor does it absolve us of the responsibility as a society to mitigate that harm.
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If you have serious suicidal ideation you would be better off not having a gun, and more power to you. If more people had that level of self-awareness we wouldn’t have tens of thousands of needless deaths a year. If you are in a position where that isn’t a problem and you decide you want one there are lots of places you can get instruction. The basics are very simple. Not shooting yourself or other people pretty much comes down to following four simple rules.
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Funny. It never made me feel that way. It was more like “Am I walking funny? Is the gun printing? Still there? Still there! What if it falls out? Everyone totally knows I’m carrying a gun. Shit.”
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It’s a Walther, but maybe I’m missing your point:)
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Nine-year-old girls must be worse at it:
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Nice misquote there. “When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.”
When you have a hammer, a drill, a saw, a hard hat, gloves, tape measure, clamps, workbench, square and pencil you are a construction carpenter. The hammer is just one option.
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I really find that curious. I’ve been seeing more and more people dismiss gun violence by citing the suicide statistics. Which is odd given such statistics and arguments origin in the “yo we need some gun control” side of the things.
A good guy with a gun cant stop a suicide in an epic shoot out featuring pithy one liners. And those people are still dead. By gun. In an environment where it’s perilously easy to get one. And they’re aren’t many requirements with regards to keeping or storing one.
The whole narrative undermines the guns as protection, guns make you safer narrative. Which is core to the free for all argument.
Maybe it’s connected to the “mental health” excuse with mass shootings.
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Mine’s usually at the local gun club, in their safe, where a gosh awful lot of people keep theirs too.
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