Instead there are other ways you could handle this situation by calling the police because carrying or having any weapons at all risks you and puts you in danger.

LaPierre's proclamation bears the hallmarks of a litany of misconceptions. Gun aficionados often frame the debate in terms of protection, but it is vital to realise that the vast majority of rape and murder victims are not harmed by nefarious strangers, but by people they know, and often love – friends, family members, lovers.

But if the parent doesn't have a proper license for a gun, there should be no guns in the first place.

What I'm saying, is that after the age of 12, so anywhere above that point has a chance of unintentional killing. So yes, no 12 years olds should have guns but neither should 16-year-olds.

While defensive gun use may occasionally occur successfully, it is rare and very much the exception – it doesn't change the fact that actually owning and using a firearm hugely increases the risk of being shot.

Rates of firearm injury death increase rapidly after age 12. And unintentional shootings of children and teens are underreported in the CDC data, possibly because of the difficulty of characterizing a child’s intent after he or she has killed himself or a playmate with a firearm. Everytown tracks unintentional shootings involving children, which occur every 34 hours, on average

Guns have a curious psychological effect beyond this: a 2006 study by Dr Jennifer Klinesmith and colleagues showed men exposed to firearms before an experiment had much higher testosterone levels and were three times more likely to engage in aggressive behaviour relative to the subjects not primed with a weapon.

Guns have a curious psychological effect beyond this: a 2006 study by Dr Jennifer Klinesmith and colleagues showed men exposed to firearms before an experiment had much higher testosterone levels and were three times more likely to engage in aggressive behavior relative to the subjects not primed with a weapon.

Guns have a curious psychological effect beyond this: a 2006 study by Dr Jennifer Klinesmith and colleagues showed men exposed to firearms before an experiment had much higher testosterone levels and were three times more likely to engage in aggressive behavior relative to the subjects not primed with a weapon.

Nor did guns make the women safer; women who purchased guns were 50% more likely to be killed by an intimate partner. So LaPierre's "good woman with a gun" is actually, it seems, putting herself in danger.

Argument 2:

Former Navy reservist Aaron Alexis, 34, killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard, near the U.S. Capitol. He was killed in a shootout with police. Alexis was employed at the base by a military subcontractor. The fact that someone from the military has no proper gun restrictions is crazy. The military, as well as the citizens, should both have gun restrictions that allow the person to have only one gun that is empty and only usable if having a proper license. After all, if the military can't control themselves, how can the citizens? A proper license should be required to owning a gun as well as having only one empty gun. This is only one shooting that I have used. On an average day, 93 Americans are killed with guns. I'm not making these numbers up and are totally legit. The fact is if that many Americans are killed every day, what is to say it's not you next?

Women living in a home with one or more guns were three times more likely to be murdered; for women who had been abused by their partner, their risk of being murdered rose fivefold if the partner owned a gun.

People with firearms were about 4.5 times more likely to be shot than those who did not carry any firearms.