I have been thinking about getting a gun.  As a rational, peace-loving optimist, this startles me. However, I am down to only one hesitation.  I have always had the fear that a gun could misfire and blow up in my hand, leaving me dead or without a hand.

Do it!  It's great fun.  I was fearful of guns at first.  I literally jumped with fear from the shots when I first went to the range, and yes, I feared it would "blow up" in my hand.  But you get over that really fast.  Like anything else, like flying an airplane, you need to learn how to do it safely. Yes there is risk, but you manage the risk to minimize it.

I know Rush and her husband.  They are good people.  They are also VERY Smart people.

Oh my gosh, you are a sweetie pie, you made my day!   

In the meantime, to keep themselves safe firearm enthusiasts pay a cost.  There is the cost of the firearm, its ammunition, its upkeep and the time it takes to stay proficient.  That money and time could be used for exercise to stave off cardiovascular illness, which is orders of magnitude more likely to kill you than a firearm.  Those resources could be used for other leisure activities to improve your mental state and lower your blood pressure.  Stress-related diseases and stroke are orders of magnitude more likely to affect you than being shot with a firearm. 

That's actually a very good point with which I agree, if the costs in time and money were comparable, and I were poor enough that I couldn't have both.

Then I would need to weigh the stakes as well as the odds.  Lets say the odds of me dying from a heart attack are very high, lets even say they are 100%, I'll give you that.  If I don't spend money on gym membership and instead become a "gun enthusiast", then the odds are 100% I will die of a heart attack anywhere between age 45 and 90.  Let's say I am a young woman and the odds of me being murdered are very low, but if it does happen, I get to suffer prolonged torture and rape before I die. 

Let's see, what to do?  Just how small would the odds need to be before I'd chance the torture session and losing from 25 to 70 years of my life?  Okay you make a fair point, I'll grant you that there is some number low enough. But I am also going to have to include the odds of me being in a natural disaster where the thugs from the inner city swarm out like cockroaches and loot my neighborhood.  Then you have to add the odds of being in a convenience store when it's robbed, or a bank, or in a mall when the next jihadist goes whacko. And the odds that the neighbor's pack of pit bulls will get loose. And so on.

The odds of any one of these things hurting or killing me is very small, but the cumulative odds of something happening which would make me wish I had a gun, is not so small. Maybe still small, but not infinitesimal, and the stakes of the worst of them are SO very high, that I think on balance I need to take my heart attack. But I don't need to make that choice. I can afford my gun AND get good healthcare, so it's a no brainer.  In this case, why wouldn't I want to be ready to defend myself?

The odds of my home being victim to some sort of armed incursion are laughably small.  And I am not sufficiently stupid to risk my life defending insured property.

It's not the odds, it's the stakes. And it's less about defending insured property than defending your life.  Just a few blocks from my mother's house someone entered the home of an elderly lady and killed her, then took her property. I can list many other stories close to me,  including the young pregnant wife of my coworker, kidnapped, forced to get money from the ATM, then killed and her body dumped over a bridge into a river.  THAT funeral was a heartbreaker. By the way, she was white, they were black, but that doesn't make me hate all blacks or go riot in the streets. It does alert me to the level of hatred from SOME blacks toward whites, but I don't discriminate; I'm equally alert to white threats. My brother was approached alone in a dark parking lot by men (white) who began to flank him with obvious ill intent. He let the breeze blow open his jacket to reveal his pistol, and they stopped, backed off and left.  So you don't even need to USE a gun for it to save you. You don't even need to show it, hell, you don't even need to own one for gun rights to be protecting you. In areas where gun carry is legal your chance of being a victim is greatly reduced.  You're welcome.

I can't tell you the exact odds of my ever needing a gun, but it's simple and easy enough insurance to have. If it ever happens, I am ready, and I will live to enjoy my grandchildren. 

To me, this is the key issue.  What cop is going to bet his life that someone hasn't painted a real gun up to look like a toy?  One obvious solution is (and always has been) for people to recognize that cops get nervous when they see you holding something (ANYTHING) and so don't do that.  Keep your hands visible and follow orders. 

Tim

Also this. Keep your hands visible, immediately drop ANYTHING you're holding, and follow orders. They are making guns now that look like cell phones.

And Hillary won't either.

I would think about voting for Gary Johnson, but I don't want to take my vote away from the only person that can beat Hillary.  I would feel as though I voted for Hillary, if she wins.

But if the situation changes significantly in the next few months, then Johnson just might get my vote.

This is exactly my state of mind right now.

If you correct that to "folks haven't anything easier to do", then I'd agree with you.  There are better things to do, they just take a bit of hard work, getting up in the morning, not staying out late at night, being cordial to customers, etc...the adult things.  But to say that people are criminals because there are not other opportunities for them is just not believable.

To say they just don't have anything better to do (steingar's words) is kind of misstating it but I know what he means.  The way you put it in your last sentence is more accurate, they do it because there are not other opportunities.  I'm talking about the poverty stricken inner city folks.  At its most basic, people do what is most rational for their particular circumstance.  The deeply disenfranchised may actually, literally, have NO other opportunity.  Heck if I had zero job prospects, zero chance of a college education, had a low IQ from whatever drug my welfare mom did when I was a fetus, and whatever poor nutrition I was raised on, and lived with cockroaches, I might escape into drug using and drug pushing too.

I used to believe that inner city blacks were completely at fault for their own circumstance.  Personal accountability and all that.  And I still believe in personal accountability as a guiding principle, but a person can be accountable for only what is within the limit of their potential, their environment and their circumstance.  The things that got them trapped in the ghetto in the first place are forces beyond their control and so strong only those endowed with unusual intelligence and drive, plus no small amount of luck, escape. For the rest, at this point, many generations deep in that culture and lifestyle, it becomes almost a virtual impossibility to be anything different. THIS is the core problem that the Black Lives Matter movement is trying to express, although they are deeply stupid, criminal, misguided and evil.  The police are NOT the problem and not the enemy but they're too stupid to figure it all out.

For example, one major reason there are no jobs is that manufacturing vanished from the cities.  So what about entrepreneurs and small business?  Desegregation allowed the smarter, more ambitious blacks (the ones who started small businesses and the professionals, the doctor, lawyers and teachers) to move away.  It was a good thing for them, but a bad thing for those left behind, who no longer could benefit from the jobs that the ambitious blacks provided when they were confined to black areas of town AND from the stabilizing influence of those "higher quality" individuals in a neighborhood. Segregation is evil and it was right to end it but this was one of the unintended consequences.  No, railing against the police, who more than anything protect blacks against crime committed by blacks against their own selves is to COMPLETELY miss the point.  They should be railing against our trade policies that killed industry in the U.S., over regulation that has strangled small business, welfare and housing programs that have ruined the family and created generations of fatherless kids, raised without male discipline (who then turn to gang leaders as their alpha male role models), and last but not least, the insane "War on Drugs", a dismal failure on every front and possibly THE most damaging factor in all this mess, sending most of the males to prison before they have any chance at becoming a decent MAN.

So that's the black inner cities. What about everybody else?  In addition to the SAD making brains unhappy, I believe our culture has collectively become enablers.  In this I completely agree with you.  It's taking the easy way out to just do drugs instead of working for your next meal.  Assuming there IS a job out there for you, if it's not a fun job, and your parents let you live in the basement rent free, then why flip burgers? I think this pretty much defines the typical white middle class drug addict (excluding elderly disabled "accidental" addicts).

As for the rich Charlie Sheen types, drug addiction among celebrities is pandemic. What on earth makes people believe being rich and famous equates to being happy??  Those people are MISERABLE.  Ever put yourself in their shoes?  Being a famous musician or actor has got to be one of the most high pressure jobs possible, living under a microscope with the whole world judging you. Throw in any kind of complication such as being bipolar or having been abused as a child, and then being steeped in the partying scene and expected to be "on" for people all the time would make it very difficult to "just say no".

So it IS believable some people do it because there are just no opportunities, but others do it because the opportunities just aren't good enough to be worth it, and those I think are being enabled.  If you have a job that is very meaningful and rewarding, you're less likely to do drugs but if you get your engineering degree and can't find a job other than flipping burgers, and someone enables you by paying your rent and groceries, you escape worrying about your dismal career prospects by doing drugs. 

A lot of it is the work ethic is no longer being transmitted to the younger generations. Our whole culture is too soft on them, bubble wrapping them and making them expect robots and technology to do all the labor and all their thinking for them.  So I agree with you that the lack of work ethic is also a big contributing factor.