I competitively shoot 3-gun, so the answer to whether I own guns or not is a resounding Yes, and many. At two of my interviews, I've had good conversations with my interviewers about firearms and sports shooting.
The type of firearms I own including a good number of military-style rifles, and pistols. I shoot them regularly, compete with them regularly. My main competition go-to gun is usually on my hip at all times and locations, legally permitting. As I have seen in my current line of work, having some form of self-protection is very prudent, and it is risky to maintain the attitude of "crime can't happen to me."
"Mexico blames the U.S. for arming the world's most powerful drug cartels, a complaint supported on Friday by a U.S. government report that found nearly all of Mexico's escalating drug killings involved weapons from north of the border."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/28/world/main4835694.shtml
"[W]hile it is impossible to know how many firearms are illegally smuggled into Mexico in a given year, about 87% of the firearms seized by Mexican authorities and traced in the last five years originated in the U.S., according to data from Dept. of Justices Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. According to U.S. and Mexican officials, these firearms have been increasingly more powerful and lethal in recent years."
This information is not only wrong, but an outright lie. According to the Beuro of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the number of mexican crime guns that could be traced to the US is closer to about 17%, not 87%.
According to the BATFE:
"In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced -- and of those, 90 percent -- 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover -- were found to have come from the U.S.
But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.
In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means
83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/02/myth-percent-small-fraction-guns-mexico-come#ixzz1D26OWdXY"
Various arms smugglers can be thanked for this figure, along with theft from the Mexican government. Approximately 32,000 soldiers have deserted from the mexican army since 2005 (iirc), taking all kinds of things with them, including their issued rifles.
In addition, smuggling accounts for a large number of guns in the cartel's hands. This makes a lot of fiscal sense to the cartels: Why smuggle individual semi-automatic rifles bought for $1,000+ in the US across the Mexican border, when the can buy crates of fully-automatic Chinese AKMs for about $120 each (average street price for an AK in the world is $40-$120 as of 2004).
As for the notion that taking away guns will lower crime, I submit the experience that Australia has had. In 1996 Australia banned and confiscated firearms from almost all its citizens. The result was that in 1997, there was a modest increase in homicides, burglary, robbery, and armed robbery. (
link). In the US there has been over 10,000 gun control laws passed, yet even the CDC has concluded that not even one of those laws had been effective at lower crime.
The conclusion that the CDC came to was that removing firearms had a very small statistically insignificant impact on crime - that is the CDC concluded that on violent crime, access is to firearms is not a major contributor to the likelihood of it occurring. If people want to hurt one another, Knives, Screw Drivers, sports equipment, and various miscellaneous items are just as effective and much more available then firearms.
As for the constitutional rights to bear arms referring only to muskets, I agree. Likewise, the freedom of speech and press only applies to oratory and movable type. The government is perfectly within their rights to censor other information media not directly enumerated within the constitution, including, but not limited to the internet, television, any documents printed using modern printing techniques, radio, and et cetra. So, you do have the right to say what you say, just not on the internet, radio, television, over the phone, or with anything printed using an non-1770's movable type printer.
