Why I personally choose not to have any guns inside my house.
Let me preface this with saying I'm not intrisinsically opposed to having a gun in one's own house for personal protection if the situation warrants it. If one has been the victim of repeated burglaries or home invasions, I could well understand wanting to have a gun in the home, so long as it is safely secured and out of sight. And reasonable, as in not a AR-15 with large clip capacity.
However, for me personally, I live in a quiet neighborhood. There have been few, if any, instances in recent memory of any break-ins or burglaries. So I don't view that as a major threat, at least not one that I'm not comfortable with beyond locking my doors and having a 34 inch aluminum baseball bat under my bed.
But I choose not to have guns. As I have repeatedly said over and over in the past week and beyond, while many objects could potentially be used as a deadly weapon, guns are different because they are designed to be a deadly weapon. And because they are designed to be a deadly weapon, they are far more efficient that something that isn't designed to be a deadly weapon.
Why do I choose to limit myself like that? It's a two-fold analysis. First, I do not feel comfortable having something in my home that I could not trust my spouse or my kids with 100%, and if we learned anything last Friday, it's that you can't even trust your own children. I would have to keep the combo to my gun safe secret to me and me alone. And I hate keeping secrets from my family, but I feel I would be forced to do so in that situation.
Secondly, beyond that initial discomfort, I have to ask myself if the utility is outweighed by the risk? Sure, from time to time I see the kitchen knife set and it briefly hits me that it could potentially be used as a deadly weapon. But it's also a knife set that we frequently use to chop food and cut steak and do all the other things knives have the ability to do. Guns don't have that advantage: they do one thing and one thing alone, and that is shoot a sharp projectile at the speed of sound into a target with the intent to tear through that target, including human flesh. And with no recent history of break-ins or home invasions in my neighborhood, the chances of me using it against an armed intruder are slim. And to live with the guilt if my gun were used for any other reason than that would just tear me up inside. It's just not worth it to me.
If circumstances change, perhaps I'd re-evaluate. If there were a rash of home invasions on my street, I could very well decide the utility does outweigh the risk. But we haven't gotten to that point yet, and I doubt we'll be getting to that point any time soon.
A gun should not be treated like a toy or a collector item. It should be treated very seriously and should not be viewed lightly. Having a gun shouldn't be something to brag about. They are an extreme instrument of death. There are times when a person, even a private citizen, may utltimately need to arm him or herself with one. But the more and more we realize that it should only be done as an extreme, emergency measure, the less and less incidents like what we saw on Friday are likely to occur.