According to the New York Times, Americans who keep guns in their homes are a shrinking minority. In 1977, more than half of American households reported having a gun in their homes. In 2010 less than a third of American households reported having a gun in the home and just 9.9% of women. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/us/rate-of-gun-ownership-is-down-survey-shows.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130310&_r=0
Other reasons given for lower overall gun ownership in the video above include;
1. Lower military participation/conscription
2. Aging gun owners (65+ year old individuals tend towards getting rid of their guns)
3. Younger people are disinterested in gun ownership
4. Land issues that limit gun use
5. Increasing single moms with kids as head of households
Over the long term, this may spell bad news for profits in the gun industry and the National Rifle Association. Contrary to this gun lobby’s fear based propaganda machine, most Americans think a gun in the home is a bad idea.
Just owning a gun and having lead ammo laying around is hazardous to your health and to the health of your entire family. Just picking up and handling a lead bullet is hazardous to your health. According to the EPA, lead is one of the most hazardous substances known to humankind. Even one small patch of lead paint on a windowsill can lead to a poisoning incident and the death of a child. A single bullet made of lead can exceed the amount needed to kill a child.
Is the gun industry paying for the harm it causes both through lead shot, deaths and injuries? No. The gun industry is currently getting a get out of jail free pass, because they pressured politicians to get a law passed that provides them immunity to any harm caused by either guns or ammunition to anyone, for all time.
Why would an industry that is part of the ‘free market’ Capitalist system need immunity from lawsuits, if their product is so good for everyone?
1. Lower military participation/conscription
2. Aging gun owners (65+ year old individuals tend towards getting rid of their guns)
3. Younger people are disinterested in gun ownership
4. Land issues that limit gun use
5. Increasing single moms with kids as head of households
Over the long term, this may spell bad news for profits in the gun industry and the National Rifle Association. Contrary to this gun lobby’s fear based propaganda machine, most Americans think a gun in the home is a bad idea.
Just owning a gun and having lead ammo laying around is hazardous to your health and to the health of your entire family. Just picking up and handling a lead bullet is hazardous to your health. According to the EPA, lead is one of the most hazardous substances known to humankind. Even one small patch of lead paint on a windowsill can lead to a poisoning incident and the death of a child. A single bullet made of lead can exceed the amount needed to kill a child.
Is the gun industry paying for the harm it causes both through lead shot, deaths and injuries? No. The gun industry is currently getting a get out of jail free pass, because they pressured politicians to get a law passed that provides them immunity to any harm caused by either guns or ammunition to anyone, for all time.
Why would an industry that is part of the ‘free market’ Capitalist system need immunity from lawsuits, if their product is so good for everyone?
Research shows that more people die from self inflicted gun shots or from the family shooting other family members, than from any intruder coming into the home. See links below for more details.
There are many other reasons why gun ownership rates are declining. There are fewer and fewer hunters. Hunting causes a population to decline genetically, as hunters ‘take out’ the best genetic specimens year after year, in the pursuit of ‘trophies’.
There are more and more vegetarians and vegans, who are eating lower on the food chain, favoring smaller animals that have less impact on the environment.
There are fewer reasons to own a gun, in a world that is becoming more and peaceful and stable, with fewer and fewer dictators and despots globally.
Even the pro gun industry apologists argument that guns need to be owned in order to overthrow a possible future dictatorship does not work when it is analyzed; see links below for more details.
Due to the noise and lead contamination concerns, with fewer shooting ranges or skeet ranges available (these are all toxic waste sites, due to lead bullets or lead shot from shotguns). The focus on eliminating lead fume inhalation and eliminating lead in the environment from bullets and shot being spread all over the landscape and waterways where waterfowl eat them and die, translates into fewer people owning and using guns. People with more awareness care more about the environment and look at their real effect on the world around them, rather than ignoring and denying all of this harm caused.
Spiritually, owning a gun is often if not always about fear and/or anger, even if that fear or anger is unconscious or projected outwards. What we fear, we attract to us. What we are emotional having feelings about, we also attract to ourselves and/or experience.
If we are emotionally feeling anger and fear, while thinking violent thoughts of being attacked or shot, we attract that to ourselves. If we have constant and intense fears of being violently assaulted, we tend to attract that to ourselves, and live a fairly closed in and narrow minded life based on violence and/or fear, rather than living a more open and diverse life based on thoughts and feelings of love and peace.
Just to illustrate the point; a person who fears going outside manifests that fear by never going outside. A person with an intense fear of flying, never boards a plane. A person with a fear of talking with women never meets or mingles with women, and ends up not having a relationship.
Those who are intensely afraid of terrorists often end up becoming the very thing that they fear, by using such terrorist tactics such as torture, using DU weapons in cities,using drones to assassinate people along with innocent civilians (who are conveniently labeled collateral damage.)
The mass media gives the impression that the world is FULL of violence, when the opposite is the reality. This media virtual and fake reality ends up making those who view this ‘programming’ day after day fearful and angry, which then leads to and justifies violence both inside and outside.
Those who think fearful or angry thoughts are most often attracted to owning guns, joining gangs, and/or joining the military. Once inside of a violent ‘system’, it is not uncommon for members of that group to become desensitized to committing acts of violence against the chosen fear or anger based target, whether that is terrorists, criminals, some other religion, drug related reasons, some other race, some other culture, etc. “Those who live by a gun, die by a gun.”
Propoganda and dehumanizing methods are used to get rid of a natural peaceful conscience and substitute a killer mentality. This can happen with prescription drugs, illegal drugs or a military provided desensitizing process that leads to creating non-empathic humans.
Then it is just a small further step into the further act of committing murder against one or more human beings whether one is part of a gang, a military unit or an armed terrorist group. Even peaceful protestors can be assassinated in the fear crazed world of violence promoting gun owners and their supporters who think guns and killing are the solutions for EVERYTHING. Martin Luther King was shot by a gun owner. Kennedy was shot by a gun owner. Gandhi was shot by a gun owner.
“At around 10:50 pm on 8 December 1980, as Lennon and Ono returned to their New York apartment in The Dakota, Mark David Chapman shot Lennon in the back four times at the entrance to the building. Lennon was taken to the emergency room of the nearby Roosevelt Hospital and was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:07 pm.[129]
Ono issued a statement the next day, saying “There is no funeral for John”, ending it with the words, “John loved and prayed for the human race. Please pray the same for him.”[131] His body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York’s Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created.[132] Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life.[133] As of 2012, he remains in prison, having been denied parole seven times.[134]“
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lennon
This example is part of a wholesale slaughter of peace promoters and anti-war advocates, and the examples above are just the tip of the iceberg.
Most public peace advocates are murdered by gun owners, but gun owners are NOT murdered by peace advocates. The mass media tends to support violent solutions by airing a massive amount of programming that features guns and violence as the answer to every problem. If you hate “Peaceniks”, assassinate them. If you hate Commies, kill them. If you hate Socialists, rub them out. If you hate ‘terrorists’, kill anyone who looks a certain way, and let God sort them out.
A declaration of “war” whether it comes from a political source, a gang leader, a religious leader, or other source most often justifies the murder of large numbers of ‘enemy combatants’. Due to the chaotic and destructive nature of war, millions of innocent children, the elderly, the disabled, and women are ‘taken out’. In any war, the number of innocent civilians killed usually outnumbers the actual number of soldiers using weapons by a factor of between 2-10.
In the end stages of a major war, the struggle to win more often than not devolves into a brutal campaign of genocide, targeting civilian cities and the wholesale slaughter of millions of innocent people, in an all out attempt to win by any means necessary. Using guns to individually kill people is NOT ENOUGH. The frenzied orgy of death and violence fostered by gun and violence promoters ends up being things like Nazi Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the fire bombing of both German and Japanese cities, not to mention the killing of millions of American Indians during the ‘settling’ of the USA.
The act of gun fueled warfare is often ‘legalized’ through opposing religions who commonly have a belief in Armageddon. Periodically, there is an attempt at the complete genocidal elimination of all who do not believe in one particular way of thinking, which in turn is justified by a vengeful, angry God who will destroy all humanity, if He is not followed literally according to one of dozens of conflicting religious dogmas. These dogmas often declarie the destruction of all other non-believers or those opposed to them. (You are either with us or against us.)
This underlying violent and fear based belief system further encourages the development of more weapons, bigger guns, and weapons of mass destruction that will ultimately spell the end of humanity if they are ever used in battle. Those who develop these weapons are EAGER to try them out, but once ANYONE starts using a weapon of mass destruction, everyone else is forced to do so, just for self protection.
There are still 20,000 nuclear weapons of mass destruction (big guns) pointed at all major cities globally, enough to kill everyone on Earth twenty times over.
On the opposite side of things, a focus on living a life based on love and peace is possible. There are many examples of this, and a famous song below illustrates the potential of what may happen if humanity chooses this path, both in terms of consciousness and positive focus, where all needs are provided for.
To get us from here to there, we do have weapons that can be used. Prayer is one very powerful weapon, which does not rely on guns or violence to accomplish something.
http://www.souledout.org/newworldreligion/worldprayers/peaceprayers.html
Bottom line, real peace begins within, not with any number of guns, or more guns. We also cannot force people to become peaceful through laws, edicts and taking away guns by force.
The way to a peaceful world is through development of a greater awareness, and to pursue a larger sense of consciousness. Once a person realizes and EXPERIENCES that all people are ONE, it is harder to murder part of one-self.
Prayer and meditation are one way to get from where we are now, to the state of Being that John Lennon points to so eloquently. Another way towards a more peaceful world is to reduce the money and focus on weapons, war and killing.
The Dept. Of Peace has no funding, but the Dept. of War in the US receives over 50% of all money collected via taxes. Is it any wonder that the US is so violent, that it has the highest gun murder rate and the largest per capita number of people in prison in all of the civilized world?
Gun Ownership Rates Declining For Many Reasons; via A Green Road
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2013/03/gun-ownership-rates-declining-for-many.html
For more articles on violence prevention and reduction; go to;
Peace, War, Human Rights, Justice, Prisons
AGR Free Press 
There is another reason which I think plays an important role in decreasing the number of gun ownerships. It is the ever changing gun laws. If a person keeps a gun, he has to keep updated with the firearms laws which changes like weather. Who knows what rule may put that person in jail for breaking the law (even though unknowingly).
Regards,
Scott Edvin
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