"Guns have no useful purpose" Correction: guns have no useful purpose that you can personally imagine (or that you are personally willing to accept). Yes, I

"Guns have no useful purpose" Correction: guns have no useful purpose that you can personally imagine (or that you are personally willing to accept). Yes, I am a gun owner. I own three rifles, and at least two have a clear utility argument: 1. .22lr is for basic practice (aiming, breathing control, etc.) at low expense. 2. .270 is for hunting deer. Where I live, there are more whitetail deer than there were when Europeans first arrived on this continent, and the only way to keep that population under control is by hunting. Deer are the cause of numerous automobile accidents and cause quite a bit of property damage. In some suburban areas where deer hunting is not allowed, towns occasionally hire people to exterminate deer because they have become pests. Right there, you have useful purposes for a large class of firearms. Killing pests on farms is another common use of rifles. "We can eliminate unnecessary risk (like guns)." So what you are saying is that anyone with children should not be a hunter or farmer, or that they should store their guns somewhere other than their home (and hope they are not stolen)? The problem with your argument is that it is a blanket statement -- you are talking about guns as a general thing, which covers little BB guns all the way up to naval canons. Some guns have immediate and obvious civil uses, but you leave no room for that.