Personally, I don't really give a crap about guns. The stats for the last few years show that of all the gun deaths in the US, more than half of them were from someone committing suicide. So, the single biggest use for guns in this country is to make it easy for people to kill themselves. And houses that don't have guns? Much, much lower chance that someone in that house will commit suicide by *any* means. It's as if guns have an aura of death around them that infects those nearby, causing them to kill themselves when otherwise they would not.
The stats for guns being used for defense aren't all that great either. Many times the guns are used against the owners, or simply stolen while the owner is gone and used against someone else. And within 10 feet, knives are better than guns in terms of effectiveness. So, self-defense? Meh, not so much.
If you're going to go to the park with a sniper rifle and start blowing away college students or something, okay, guns *are* good for that. If you want to kill yourself, guns are good for that too (90+ percent suicide success rate with a gun).
So, really, that leaves hunting. If you really do go hunting to supply your family with meat, more power to you. But guns could be rented for that, no great need to *own* one. Rent your gun, kill your deer, turn in gun, go home and skin and eat it. Not rocket science.
Let's theorize a bit. The goal of guns is to kill people (or animals, in rare cases). Let us theorize that we create the ultimate gun. You look at your target and you think 'Die!" and the target falls over dead, simple as that. No second shots, no chasing the prey, you just look at the target and think them dead and boom, they're dead. Now, let's give everyone one of these superguns. Would civilization survive the ultimate gun? No way in hell. So, by constantly working to perfect guns, we're actually working toward a goal that, if ever realized, would end our civilization. That's how bad guns are, so bad that if we ever perfect them, we doom ourselves in the process.
Now don't get me wrong. I like guns. I like the math involved in distance shooting (500 yards and longer, and it doesn't really get interesting until you're at 1000+ yards). I was an expert marksman in the Army. I've had lots of training with guns, grenades, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, pistols, knives, bayonets. I familiarized myself with AK-47s and Makarov submachine guns during the invasion of Grenada. I used M-14s while a member of the Arizona Honor Guard. I have used lots of guns, and lots of different *kinds* of guns, and they're fun enough.
I do not own one though. Why? Because I don't want to become one of those death-aura suicide statistics, for one reason. I also don't really feel much need for one. For a home intruder, I know where the knives are (and the baseball bat, and the nail gun, and the hammer, and the icepicks), and I don't think there's any way an intruder would get the drop on me in my own home, especially in the dark. I can kill someone more quietly and quickly and surely without a gun, at least in the close quarters that is my home, and with less damage to my home, than I could with a gun.
If Obama puts a couple of people on the Supreme Court that override that latest 2nd amendment decision, I'll shed no tears. I don't believe they made a valid decision. If the 'well-regulated militia' phrase is meaningless, why did our founding fathers put it there? The decision rendered by the court makes it as if our founding fathers never added that phrase at all, which was simply avoiding the problem of interpreting it. They didn't interpret the 2nd amendment, they ignored part of it. That was wrong. I believe the founding fathers wanted people to be able to have guns *only* if they are part of a well-regulated militia. I know lots of people who own guns, and *none* of them are part of a well-regulated militia, except for those in the National Guard or the Reserves.
In any case, McCain has no hope of winning this election. He's an old, stodgy conservative white guy, which is what the conservatives have been throwing out there for more than two hundred years. He's boring, totally unexciting, with old ideas that won't work in a new world. Whether you like Obama or not, you better get used to the idea that he is going to be our president.