What I see as important here is that it is 66% of battered women situations involved a firearm. (again, no mention of whether it was legally owned or not)

It does not say that 66% of firearm owners batter women.

You may not like firearms and that is ok. I don't like broccoli and would rather die than eat it, but I promise I won't try to make it harder for you to have it if you like it.

Why couldn't you get a gun? You could still have a shot gun or a .22. Both would do the job if you needed a job done.

I am certain that if someone or something threatened my family and I had a gun within arms reach, I wouldn't think twice. (fortunately for any potential criminals I don't have a gun)

How about Broccoli Raab? Is it all Cruciferous vegetables?

Meh. I googled home invasion statistics, and the first several pages were scare tactic sites by insurance and security companies. It's just another boogy man tactic for taking your money.

I hope you're not characterizing me that way.

Apparently - see above.

I bought firearms (a .22 and a shotgun) to protect my garden from woodchucks, skunks, possums, rabbits, and deer.

I also (attempted) to use my guns to put meat on the table. (If god had wanted us to be vegetarian then why did he make animals out of meat?) Because I keep my guns and ammo locked up they would prove unhandy in the event of an intruder. I'd probably just rely on the old fashioned heavy bedside lamp and sock full of quarters.

I didn't say there's only one reason to own a gun.

Yes F3, you are correct.
I misinterpreted the wording of the abstract, and I apologize.
Below is the abstract, along with the associated paragraph in the full article.

In the Abstract:
In the full text of the publication

That last part is very interesting as well. Add some "liquid asshole" to the equation and things get out of hand.

The whole topic is horribly depressing.

Why? Umm, the law, you know?

I haven't actually checked this out, just what I've picked up over the years, but I'm pretty sure you can only have a gun if:
you're a licensed security guard
you're a licensed professional shooter
you're a rural landowner who can demonstrate a need to control vermin
you're a member of a sporting target shooting club that shoots to olympic standard
you're a member of a licensed hunting organisation.

Home defense is explicitly NOT a lawful reason to have a gun.

I don't come anywhere near any of those categories.

I not really sure about any of that, it is just what I remember from the changes brought in after the Port Aurthur Massacre. (For teh Merkins, in 1996 a crazy guy went really really crazy and killed 35 people in Tasmania. After that we put a lot of restrictions on semi-automatics, pump-action shotguns, and magazine size. We also made it against the law for crazy people to have guns.)

We haven't been genocided yet. ;)

Anyone can still go get a gun as long as it's not automatic in any way. You might tell them it's to keep the rabbits out (or some such thing). You're just not permitted to fire a gun in an urban area, except at a rifle range/shooting club, and they're usually on the fringes anyway.

There would be restrictions if you'd been convicted of a crime, especially one involving a weapon.

I'm sure there are other restrictions, but none that would stop an average law abiding citizen from owning a gun, provided they had the required storage facilities for said gun.

I just checked on the Qld gun laws and you don't have to be a landowner to own a gun to use for shooting pests, but you do have to have permission from a landowner (over 40 acres) for the purposes of shooting to prove your eligibility for a gun license.

Thought I'd check just to make sure I wasn't speaking out of my arse. Sometimes it's hard to tell.

Hey, that didn't stop me. :D

Oh and yeah, all guns must be stored in locked gun safes.
There was a move a while back to make sporting target shooters store their guns at the gun club, not in their homes, but I think that didn't go through, because it would be such a tempting target for thieves.

I wouldn't worry too much about being uninformed on this one. Most people from the city don't get out to the country that much anyway, and when they do, it's not usually for the purpose of shooting stuff.

To all intents and purposes, most people who live in urban areas probably would have trouble presenting a reason for owning a gun. I sometimes forget my family still has pretty strong rural ties, so people who own guns and use them are pretty common to me.

in my American Judicial Process class at the community college of vermont a couple weeks ago, we were dealing with a case where a 14 year old kid shot a man who was in their house to have sex with his bipolar, possibly schizophrenic, unmedicated mother who thought a family lived under their trailer and pulled out all the insulation, freezing their pipes and cutting off their running water. The kid said that the man had to leave because his mother didn't know what she was doing and couldn't consent, the man didn't, the kid brandished his shotgun, the man attacked him, the kid shot him.
I raised the point that nobody questioned that a 14-year-old owned and kept his own shotgun.
The class just kind of went, um, yeah, its vermont, why the hell wouldn't a 14-year-old have his own shotgun?

That's the difference between CCV and Bennington College!