- As a gun guy who's also a journalist and professor in a town sometimes called "The Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor," I meet plenty of people who think I should be ashamed of myself. But in failing to address the challenges presented by the latest massacre of innocents, United States senators have done what nobody else has managed to do: make me, for the first time, truly embarrassed about the company I'm lumped with, including theirs.
I find this debate basically silly. The people who own person-killing machines aren't typically the ones doing the person killing. That is done by hand guns almost exclusively. If we want to talk about safety, we should be talking about ways of ensuring that would-be criminals don't end up with hand guns. Really this "debate" is mostly about how we don't like things that look big and scary and mean. I've personally known six people who have been shot, four as criminal acts (two of whom died), two by suicide. All of the crimes, and one of the suicides were hand guns. The other suicide was a shotgun, also not on the assault weapon list. This doesn't include the 10 or so people I know who have been robbed at gun point, also all by hand guns. The only people I know who own high powered rifles are responsible sportsmen.
I'm getting this mainly from Agatha Christie or something, but I was under the impression that committing suicide with a shotgun was extremely impractical and not at all easy.The other suicide was a shotgun, also not on the assault weapon list.