Oh, I have no problem with guns. I own a rifle and enjoy target shooting. I recently got my hunting license and plan to start hunting this summer.
I have also lived in very rural areas and some very shady parts of town. I'm in Canada though, so handguns just aren't as prevalent up here (although I do have friends with restricted licenses and handguns they can shoot at the range).
I had an "interesting" youth. Growing up in rural area means I'm no stranger to seeing people at parties getting beer bottles smashed over their heads during fights or hit with ash trays at bars. Looking back at that, there was not a single situation where a person having a handgun would have made things better. It almost definitely would have made things much worse. People would have died as opposed to just need stitches at the hospital. Even in this rural area, it wasn't that difficult to talk my way out of bad situations. I was blasted out of the blue once, but it was a case of mistaken identity.
I think that if home invasions were a real threat to my family then I would really start to think about moving. There are just so many nicer places to live.
As an interesting side-note, I imagine many of the people there may have actually owned guns and even had them on them. And yet they didn't use them. If they indeed had them, then they also knew the importance of proper gun safety, even when drunk and angry :)
And yes, probably.. as long as you weren't hundreds of thousands of dollars upside down on your mortgage with 5 kids (requiring a large house) [and so on, insert rough situation here]
Canada has a very different culture despite its proximity to the US. You can't even compare the two. In my experience, people in the US are taught to feel that they are losers if they don't achieve a certain amount (or basically get what they want), whereas Canadians, in general, seem far more serene about the ups and downs of their lives.
Yes, it is a generalization, but it is very real. For instance, look at the disparity between violent crime rates in Seattle and Vancouver.
On your second point, I feel that you are speculating. Neither you or I know what a handgun would bring in those situations. People who do concealed carry in the US are statistically very unlikely to commit violent crime, far far less than the general population. The mere presence of gun isn't as big of a deal as many people fear.
The thing that troubles me in the US is that gun control advocates continuously attempt to paint a future where there are no handguns. We can't even keep cellphones out of prisons in the US, or eradicate drugs (which have been illegal for decades). With that in mind, essentially telling criminals in a society of extremes that they have nothing to worry about, that law-abiding citizens will be disarmed, seems incredibly foolish.
If we had it to do all over again, I'd be for strict gun control in the US, but we have to deal with the way things are now, not some imaginary reset. Maybe the issue for today is an early ban on armed drones.
