For or Against Gun Control?

I know this is going to be a very HOT topic and many of us will have a difference in opinion and I welcome all. Only I do ask to keep it nice, we are all adults and have a right to our own opinion. Name calling will be deleted. First I want to tell you a little about me that you may and may not have known just so when I explain my thoughts you will understand more.

Around the age of 7 or 8 I was kidnapped by my own mother, I met some pretty shady individuals along the way. Eventually my father found us and the police brought us back home to him. But she’d come back into the picture a year or two later and get visitation rights, this probably wasn’t the best of ideas for a judge to make but that’s another story. I continued to meet shady individuals she would bring into her homes/trailers when we’d visit her for a weekend. One particular weekend stands out when a drunk, or maybe he was high man came to visit. I was a bit older at the time (probably between 10-11) he kept talking about how he liked me eventually she convinced him his dog was outside and when he went out she locked the door. This didn’t stop this crazy man from wanting to come back in though, instead he’d push and try pulling the door, screaming let him in. He broke windows to get into the tiny trailer as we hid, we had nothing to protect ourselves with besides household items. We cowered in the corner until we got desperate enough to risk running out a back door right beside a window he was climbing in. Police finally came but this could’ve had a different story had he caught us.

Fast forward to my early 20s, I’m living on my own with my 1 yr old (his dad is stationed in Japan at the time) some psycho finds me in the town and decides to stalk me. I’d never seen him before, in fact the first time I’d meet him I thought he was hired by my landlord to cut my grass because the day before he told me he didn’t believe a woman should do it on her own. This big man that shows up at my door at 7 am informs me that he has been watching me for some time, knows I have children (he mistakes two sisters that had come to visit two weeks prior as my own) and that my husband is never there. He wants inside to use the phone but when I go to shut the door his combat boot gets in the way. When my son wakes up I know I’m doomed. But I see a neighbor and am able to distract him long enough to get out and yell for her. When I do he lets me know he’s not finished with me and will be back. I’m scared and have no clue what to do. That night I have a family member stay at my house in case he comes back. That night he does come back, he is messing between my car and my family member’s vehicle but we can’t see anything in the dark. The next day a trip that should’ve only taken 15 minutes takes much longer, when we have it brought to the auto shop they call us immediately when they discover it should’ve blown up. I call the police and they inform me this same man had recently told his pyschiatrist at the time that he was stalking someone and the voices in his head were telling him to kill her. I was at that point put on a 9-1-1 alert and if he came by and I called they were suppose to be there immediately. By the way my house was a parking lot away from the station.

He followed me when I’d go grocery shopping, walk by my house and wiggle my door handle or knock on my windows making gestures, when I’d call police they’d take 15-30 minutes, he’d be gone by then. Eventually they told me unless they caught him in the act or he harmed me there was nothing they could do. I moved out of state. Fast forward to about 4 years ago, the kids and I had just finished a yard sale and put it all back in the garage. Once upstairs I would realize my phone was left on the back of the minivan parked inside my garage, my son runs down to go get it and screams we have two intruders. They  go at him but he runs locking the door behind him, I grab knives but that is all I have and run for the front door. I hand the knives to him informing him if they come up to stab them. They got away but I know that could’ve ended badly, I was horribly shaken as I really had no way of protecting my four children besides a knife.  Last year, the apartment complex I live in had a rapist come inside a home and rape a woman for hours.

With all that being stated I want to come clean and announce I do not own a gun, not because I do not believe in them though. I just don’t believe I should have one if I don’t know how to use one and haven’t found the time to take a class. I do want one, I’ve had too many close calls to not want one. I want to know that if someone does break into my home, (I can’t say it would never happen to me, look at my situations) I want to be able to protect myself and my kids.

I believe that a gun ban is only going to hurt those trying to keep protection in their homes in case an intruder comes in. It will be those breaking in that have the guns anyways as they are the ones that would not be caring about the ban. When you come face to face with an intruder with a gun and it is you and your kids would you rather just stare him down or shoot him?  Look at the Georgia mom who had her twins at home with her when an intruder came in, she hid herself and them in a crawl hole and he still came to find them. Had she not had a gun to shoot him, either they would’ve been raped, beaten or murdered (Mom shoots intruder). Now if you live near a city you may have read in the paper how intruder shot and killed someone when they broke into a home, or maybe they were raped, I’ve read many of these stories and really wish those that were killed could’ve done something to help themselves. Don’t you? Another woman had one intruder inside her home and another outside as a lookout, thankfully she’d seen this man before he came in and got her own gun. When he came in he showed his gun, but then she showed her gun, he took off firing a shot back at her, but she returned fire (Woman fires two shots back). She lived.

As for the gun control/ban, I believe that if the bad guys want to harm people they are going to do it regardless of what bans we have. So you take away the guns, does that mean he/she will not try blowing up a place with a bomb? Or what about the man in China that brought a knife and started slashing throats? Will he/she not crash a car into a building to cause damage? What about chemical poisons (like anthrax, it happened before)?  Many of the people harming others (especially in the movie theater shooting and Sandy Hook) were mentally ill, maybe there is something there that we can watch. I come from a long line of military that fought in wars, to them hearing a ban is horrible, they are hearing that the rights they fought for you are being taken away. They are also hearing they shouldn’t own guns even though they’ve used them to protect your rights and others in war. Can you guarantee that taking away the guns or controlling the types we have will stop the bad guys from getting their hands on them? Or will they go get them by illegal means, ie blackmarket, smuggle them in, get them off the streets, break into gun shops and take them? When you start taking away one thing, others will be taken away as well. So if we get this gun control will our knives be next? What about bats since we can use them as weapons? That’s just my take on the matter, you can voice yours, I believe everyone has a right to their opinion.

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