Plan B Forum

A case in point is our house, or rather our neighbourhood.

During my time here, I always felt that the British obsession with American gun crime was overblown.

Guns are part of America and most gun owners here are decent, peaceful people.

But here is an uncomfortable fact. My former house has the zip code 20016. I discover now that, since the Supreme Court relaxed gun ownership laws in Washington, one zipcode above all others has accounted for a surge in gun-buying: 20016.

This feels to me like a kind of madness.

When I called on the neighbours this week, I pushed open their front door. They would not have thought to lock it.

20016 is one of the safest places to live in the world. Sometimes someone parks a car facing the wrong way. (You are meant to park facing the direction of traffic.) But this is just about the limit of local criminality.

Nobody who has bought a gun in 20016 can possibly have done it out of a rational belief that he or she was reducing the risk of being attacked. So why did they?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/f ... 394259.stm

dgs49 wrote:There are many reasons to purchase a gun, and most gun purchasers have more than one reason in mind when they make their purchase.

Hunting, target shooting, skeet, shooting peasants, armed robbery, auto & truck hijacking,...these are all common hobbies in the U.S. Heck, I like to keep my old Colt .45 on a coffee table as a conversation starter.

Self-defense is secondary.