i just read thru the rest of the comments and am disheartened to see so many anti-gunners. very saddening to read the negative comments.

some say the national guard is the militia the founding fathers were talking about, however the national guard wasnt created until roughly 100 years after the 2nd amendment. They meant every able bodied male was expected to keep arms and be proficient in case he was called up to protect his country from foreign or domestic enemies ie. a tyranical govt. which over extends its authorities and imposes its will on the states and citizens (sound familiar?)

to put how important the right to bear arms is, Stalin, hitler, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Musselini & Amin all created or enforced draconian gun control and registration to disarm a population prior to a genocidal campaign. Think it cant happen in the USA?

I just dont understand how a father or mother fall asleep at nite knowing they are incapable of defending their children from an armed home invader. A typical scenario is the calvary arrives in about 14 minutes, gets an ambulance for the lucky escapees and some some body bags for the unlucky one. The cops get statements from some of the neighbors to see if anyone saw anything and they file their report and investigate it. Life goes (well not for everyone unfortunately)

forget gun control, just enforce criminal control. leave law abiding gun owners alone. when some whack job open fires in a gun free school or mall, youre going to go hide under a table and cross your fingers that an armed civilian is present who can defend you until the police get there. my advice is you too should be one of the good citizens prepared to responsably defend yourself with a firearm.

God bless this man for being a responsable adult exercise and remind people of the 2nd amendment right which is almost dead in this country.

basically, w/o the 2nd amendment, every other right will disappear b/c once disarmed...you are defenseless and not getting them back.

i personally love to see guns on good people, it desensitizes the liberal and victimhood embracers to the fact that honest citizens like guns, love self defense and cherish liberty.

id like anti-gunners to stop blaming gun owners if thru no undue neglect of their own, criminals or thugs steal their weapons. Anti-gunners can condone the criminal behavior and condemn the gun as if it had a mind of its own to be a violent weapon. That bewilders me.

recently i read a few articles about OK corral and wild west & learned that their murder rate wasnt much different from chicago or new york.

The difference being that in the wild west, both good and bad guys had guns & were on even playing fields in a shoot out.

In modern cities with draconian gun laws, the good guys are forbidden to have guns while the bad guys have access to all sorts of firearms thus having a gigantic advantage over the honest citizen.

gun control is for controlling people to be subjects and perenial infants of the govt. In their eyes, were too immature to take responsability for our own actions and not trusted or allowed to act in our own self defense.

when are life is in urgent peril or our childrens life, how are we supposed to protect ourselves from armed gunmen for the 14 plus minutes which is the avg. 911 response time?

911 and police are fine as a back up plan but every citizen should be able to protect themselves as the first line of defense.

keep in mind, its better to have a gun and not need it than need one and not have it. Criminals, rapists, burglars, kidnappers, murderers and serial killers rarely if ever make an appointment.

be prepared
yeah 2nd amendment

You know, feel free to move to my state (New Jersey) where the murder rate is far higher than Vermont even though we have the most strict gun laws along with CA.

You know whats funny? When the laws get as strict as they are here.. you start to feel like the only ones who have the right to effective self defense are the criminals (who don't obey your pieces of paper anyway).

Some of you people really make me ashamed. You call yourself civilized, I call you delusional.

And you're probably right, having the gun holstered would have been considerably safer, but it would have been far, far safer for her to keep it locked up at home. The simple fact is that carrying a gun creates exponentially more opportunities for these kinds of accidents to occur.

It is a tragedy. I hope the kid recovers OK. But if guns were outlawed for ordinary people, this grandma would still have hers because she is a judge (a "magistrate", actually).

It's ironic that you'd bring this case up in this particular discussion, because if she was open-carrying this would not have happened (the gun would be on her hip instead of in her purse where anyone could steal it or the kid get to it)

You can't have it both ways. It's all or nothing.

Luckily, the girl survived, and I can only I imagine the grandmother is regretting her decision to carry the gun.

It isn't a choice between carrying a gun and living in fear. I do neither. And I'm hardly a "victim in waiting": instead of confronting the problem with the threat of violence, though, I confront it by being involved in my neighborhood, my government, and my community.

This freak out condition is indicative of your ostrich like reaction to percieved danger. If and when you decide to take control of your life and not be a victim in waiting, you will understand why we chose to go armed. I never knew about guns until I served in the military (all should be required)and wore a sidearm to protect our nuclear devices. Why is it you (American Society) trusted me to do that but not to protect myself or my family? I never abrogated my responsibility for that to any police or government entity. I am historically aware and understand that government encroaches on the freedom of the individual by definition and I propose to limit that activity with my education, passion and political activism.Stop giving in to fear and become a responsible contributing memeber of society by being in charge of your own destiny.

You know who is likely to follow gun laws? law abiding citizens – you know who will have guns despite the strictest of gun control laws? criminals.

A good example is all this "someone will grab it out of the holster" talk – guns are incredibly difficult to pull out of someone else's holster; you'd practically have to incapacitate the owner first.

You know who's opinion I will respect? The people who've gone to shooting ranges, learned about gun safety, and maybe even fired a few rounds. If you've done that – and still want to tell me that guns are some sort of ticking time bomb then go ahead; but I'm really tired of armchair politics on the subject who don't even bother to educate themselves on the subject besides googling "gun control statistics".

I also have this to say to the fellow from Belgium above – do you hear about all the stabbings in Japan? Maybe they should outlaw knives as well – point being, people kill people.

Although, in this case I prefer concealed rather than open-carry; but it's not my place to decide for this guy.

Let's think this through then.

Someone goes out intending to rob someone.
He sees you with a gun on your hip.
He chooses to rob someone else.

The upshot is that /someone/ has been robbed. What you've done by carrying an visible weapon is pushed the problem onto someone else who doesn't carry a gun. You may think that's OK - you're probably thinking that /everyone/ should carry a gun so there'll be no robbery.
EVERYONE.

What about children?
What about weird people with voices in their heads?

By your standards they would presumably deserve the perceived protection that a weapon offers and you'd be happy for them to carry a gun - indeed, you'd expect them to carry a gun.
Now that /is/ weird!

Me - I'd rather not.

Personally, I choose not to expose my family to the real dangers of firearms in order to feel secure against some perceived, minor threat. Yes, you can be a responsible gun owner, of course, and if you want to keep guns in your own house, I won’t object. I think it’s silly, and careless, but I won’t object. I will object, though, if you decide to have a gun in the presence of my family. You want me to start taking care of myself and my family? Ok, I’ll start by asking you not to carry incredibly dangerous objects around my children.

But to get to the heart of the matter: the reason why we have more gun-related crime in this country than most (all?) other developed nations is not because we have more guns, or different laws. It’s because our culture is simultaneously infatuated with violence, and paranoid. We won’t make any progress on this issue until we affect change in both areas – and toting guns around in public is a move in the wrong direction on both counts.

Legislation is NO substitute for morality or a lack thereof. People need to stop thinking in that manner and trying to legislate against everything they dislike or everything they are afraid of and don't understand. As humans are imperfect, we will always have idiots and criminals, at least for the foreseeable future in my lifetime. Stop worrying about what those fools are doing and start worrying about taking care of yourself. I'm a law-abiding gun owner. I follow the law, I exercise firearm safety and don't endanger anyone, therefore what I do is my own business and in no way affects other's lives. If some of you can't reconcile the thought of strong-minded individual's taking charge of their own lives and taking charge of their own self defense, then keep living in your own little world of fear. I can assure you, firearms do not have minds of their own. Just because some people do carry them, does not mean the guns are going to fly off of people's hips and start shooting up the room on their own. Be afraid of the criminals and idiots and stop worrying about us safe and law-abiding gun owners as we do not deserve it.

Have you ever heard about The Battle of Athens (1946)?
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1985/2/1985_2_72. shtml

It's an interesting read. Really

In the 18th century, "well regulated" meant "well functioning", like an Regulator clock. It still means that, it's just not a common usage anymore.

Fast-forward 150 or 200 years and they would be armed with machine guns. Are you sure you wanna go there? (before you protest that the Founders never imagined machine guns in their day, do you think they imagined cell phones, the Internet, and high-speed printing presses? Does that make the 1st Amendment any less relevant?)

New York already has concealed carry, so people are packing, you just don't see it.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Anyone who argues differently is a moron.

Anyway, I googled 'western cliche' and I think we should add this sentence to the article :
"There's a shootout between some drunken cowpokes over at the old corral, the schoolmarm's been kidnapped by the Boulder Gang, a dying rider with an arrow in his back says that the Indians have attacked a passing wagon train, and Deputy Bob's got a bullet in him but Old Doc's passed out from too much whiskey. Just the start of an average day for a Sheriff in the Old West."