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I've done the first two but not the third. And while all are potentially dangerous, only one expressly designed to be dangerous to other people. What could possibly go wrong?
To me clear, I'm not in favor of banning guns. I have fond memories of shooting beer bottles off of fence posts as a teenager with a shotgun. I think I even tried hunting a few times but was not very successful. I owned BB guns as a kid but my parents (wisely) never allowed "real" guns. I have no problem with guns or the people who choose to own them responsibly. But I have a real problem with confusing the concept of being proficient in how to safely use a firearm with that of being able to make split second, life-and-death-decisions about when the use of deadly force is necessary. Only the former is required to get a CHL in texas. I also disagree with the belief that being armed makes you and the people around you safer.
Anyone who regularly reads the gunfail blog can see the number of accidental shootings that happen every week. The sad fact is, if you own a hand gun for self defense purposes, that weapon is far more likely to be used on a loved one by mistake, in a fit of rage, or in a suicide than it is to be used for it's intended purpose. And if I'm your drunk brother-in-law about to be mistaken for an intruder I would much rather you make that mistake with a baseball bat than with a .45. But the NRA loves catchy phrases like "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun." Or “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” But how many bad guys are actually stopped by our armed citizens? http://www.vpc.org/... in 2010 it was 230. That works out to about 0.7% of the 32,000 annual gun deaths in the US. But he NRA claims 2.5 million crimes are prevented by armed citizens every year. Their source? A telephone survey.
You might think that surely in the year 2014 where we have real and useful studies and statistics on everything from which types of fat make you fattest to football helmets that may or may not prevent concussions, that there must be some real and official statistics on whether or not carrying a firearm makes anyone safer. You'd be partially correct. In 1993 a study http://www.nejm.org/... found that
“Although firearms are often kept in homes for personal protection, this study shows that the practice is counter-productive,”and that
“Our data indicate that keeping a gun in the home is independently associated with an increase in the risk of homicide in the home.”There were several other studies funded by the NIH or the CDC all finding similar results. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/... But in the two decades since these studies many states have made it much easier to get a CHL. Did the trend continue or did giving guns to people somehow start making people safer? The answer is clear: In the intervening decades it has become much more dangerous, illegal even, to conduct studies that may or may not link any increase in gun violence to peaceful and responsible gun owners. It's not that we know there is or isn't a link, but since 1994, congress, under pressure from gun-rights groups, has repeatedly inserted wording into appropriations bills prohibiting the research. So the organizations best equipped to gather and evaluate the data have been specifically prohibited from doing so.
In the mean time Texas has gone the extra mile to protect our right to be armed. They recently reduced the amount of instruction required to get your Undercover-CIA-Ninja license from an overly burdensome 10 hours to a more 2nd amendment friendly 4 hours. Now virtually anyone who is not a convicted felon or declared legally insane can, for $65 (ammo not included), go from zero to legally walking around your children carrying a loaded gun with 4 hours of instruction. Is that not scary?
So can I, having never fired a handgun in my life, walk into a gun store on a Saturday morning, walk out a few hours later and receive a CHL in the mail a few weeks later? I'm afraid that I already know the answer but I'll know for sure soon enough.