Well, you got me curious since I've never bothered to read this magazine so I did a quick search on their website using the the word "gun" as my search term. This
article was the first thing that popped up on the list. I'm not saying it doesn't speak to an obvious bias but, I noticed a pretty honest caption under the Glocks at the top...."A gun wil protect you from the bad guys, but not from yourself." Having been in at least one class where a student shot himself, I can't disagree with that statement.
If my link doesn't work...Copy the following URL to your browser...
http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.d ... 00cfe793cd____
And for those not willing to visit the site...
Special Report: Men and Guns
Men buy 90 percent of all firearms sold. We're also the ones most likely to be hit when one goes off. Is it time to reevaluate this explosive relationship?
Reported by: Bill Gifford, Photographs by: Davies + Starr
The Castle Doctrine
A few months ago, I went shopping for a pistol. First, I had to fill out a form. The federal government wanted to know my name and address, my Social Security number, and whether I was an illegal alien, addicted to marijuana or other drugs, or a convicted felon. The form didn't ask if I'd ever wanted to kill somebody. (Or myself, for that matter.)
"This model really has a nice balance to it," said the bushy-browed store clerk, Steve, as I aimed the unloaded .22-caliber at a stuffed deer on display at the local branch of Gander Mountain, a massive outdoor-sports department store outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was right: The ergonomic rubber grip fit my hand better than any golf club ever had.
"I'll take it." I nodded, drawing a bead on the deer's neck, and Steve made a call to complete the required instant federal background check. A few minutes later, he swiped my credit card and walked me out to the parking lot. "Congratulations on your purchase," Steve said, and I drove off into the night with my brand-new gun and a box of bullets.
In its own cold, hard way, the pistol was a thing of beauty: form wedded lethally to function. It weighed about 2 pounds, solid but not heavy, and the matte-black, flat-sided, 5-inch steel barrel was stamped with the name of its maker: Browning, Morgan, Utah. Founded in 1878 in what was then the Utah Territory, Browning made the guns that won America's wars. I was holding a piece of history, a link to the frontier. I was thrilled, and I drove home a little bit faster than I should have.
I wasn't the first guy to fall in love with a gun. At this very moment, they can be found in roughly 30 percent of American households, according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. And 90 percent of them are bought by men, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Their primary motivation: self-defense. I myself like the thought of dishing out hot lead to any unwanted visitors in my home.
But by purchasing that gun, I'd vastly worsened my own odds of survival. I live in the country, and I'm not (yet) sleeping with any of my neighbors' wives, so I'm not at great risk of becoming a victim of homicide, the sixth-leading cause of death for men in my age group, 35 to 44. No, the person I had to fear most was me. Because 30 times a day, American men between the ages of 18 and 65 reach for a firearm and shoot themselves to death. That makes the notion of "self-defense" a lot trickier.
Before I ever walked into a gun shop, I signed up for a "personal protection" course offered by a local affiliate of the National Rifle Association (NRA). On a rainy spring morning, I showed up at the Carlisle Gun Club, a chilly cinder-block building located beside Interstate 81 in central Pennsylvania. Like me, most of my classmates had taken an earlier course on basic pistol safety, in which we learned the essential rules of firearm handling: Always point the gun in a safe direction; keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to shoot; never load the gun until you're ready to use it; and keep the ammunition in a room separate from the gun.
Now, 3 weeks later, we proceeded to unlearn most of those same rules. For self-defense purposes, a gun must be kept loaded, accessible, and ready to use; more important, we had to be prepared to shoot another human being, multiple times, if necessary. To illustrate this point, we watched an NRA-produced video in which a woman -- left home alone by her husband--plugs an intruder with two sure shots. A happy ending.
Our attention thus commanded, we reviewed the rules of engagement. First and foremost, a county prosecutor informed us, you can't just shoot somebody who's bothering you in a public place. Even if you're being threatened, you have a "duty to retreat" from the threat, if possible. But there's one place where different rules apply: your house. Under the "castle doctrine," a principle of common law, you are allowed to protect yourself against anybody who enters your home without permission, and that includes shooting him if he is threatening you with grave bodily harm. (What that means is up to a jury to decide.) In April, the State of Florida expanded its castle doctrine to include any place a person "has the right to be."
Self-defense may be all the rage, but nobody knows exactly how often guns are used that way. One well-publicized review of 15 surveys from the early 1990s claimed that Americans used handguns in self-defense some 2.5 million times per year--a number that's cited continually by the gun lobby. The person who came up with that figure, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, says the number has probably declined -- along with the crime rate -- in recent years. But, he says, guns are used for self-defense "well over a million times a year."
But even that number is far greater than what's indicated by data from the Department of Justice's (DOJ) own annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), according to David McDowall, a professor of criminology at the State University of New York at Albany. Using NCVS data from actual crime victims, McDowall estimates an average of 55,000 defensive gun uses per year between 1997 and 2001.
