"Majority of men, Republicans, and Southerners report having a gun in their households"

Who's the weaker sex here?

a lot more than women do. When I used to shoot skeet it was mostly men but we had a few competitive women as well.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/

But yeah, there's a big psychological angle to it.

Did you see this piece by John Cole?

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/12/15/true-stories-in-gun-control/

among men who need guns to defend themselves.

Good article!

Women torture themselves because they don't look like the hyper feminine women on TV, men torture themselves because they don't or can't act like the hyper masculine men they see on TV.

In both cases people are comparing themselves to a fantasy and coming off much the worse for it and it's really damaging to the psyche.

John McClane.

and men need to be physical to solve their problems. Guns are just another means to attack the problem with a physical object.

I worked the Overnight Shift alone in a Group Home with 6 mentally impaired men. The majority of staff who worked in these homes were WOMEN. It was against the law to have any type of a weapon in these homes.

Most of the nights, they slept, but not always. One time a man woke up and started screaming which woke up the other men who were furious. I was all alone. No guns, no weapons. We locked up all the cooking knives in the house.

I didn't run out of the house, or call the cops. I had to TALK THEM DOWN. That was my job and what I was trained and supposed to do.

No, guns. No, knives. Just a bit of training, my brain, and my mouth. How many men dependent on these guns for "protection" would have wanted to do this work? While I know their are women who are the same, the majority of guns are owned by MEN. It's like a gun is a extended symbol of their manhood.

Tell me again - why is this still an issue?

When not in use, they are locked up in a very sturdy safe that is bolted into the house's concrete pad and the safe has a biometric lock.
My wife does have a CHL due to the fact that several years ago, while she was in the city, she was accosted, robbed and beat up pretty badly and she swore that if it ever happened again, she would defend herself.

for an hour and see how many square jawed super hunks are popping off guns to save the day.

I don't live with a television in my home, but I am house sitting this weekend. After combing through DU, reading post after post, ingesting all the various responses to the tragedy and the various arguments for/against more/less gun control, I flipped on the TV for a mental break, and there in stunning clarity is an appliance that delivers a steady stream of gun violence, glorification, and implied all-in-one problem solving. It is completely sickening. Every day, I wake up and throw open my door to sunshine, birds chirping, and friendly neighbors. The world is not a place of high stakes espionage and murder, but you would certainly think so by watching. I'm not saying television/movies/etc. are responsible for this tragedy, but I couldn't help but notice (after not watching for a few weeks) how PERVASIVE gun violence is in any given hour on any given day. I want to propose a grand experiment whereby a handful of people pledge to record, for one hour, a certain number of television channels in prime time. They would then go through with a click counter and watch each hour from each channel and log each time a gun is fired, brandished, or otherwise presented. If enough people could do this, we would have a rough metric for how many times each evening gun violence is presented, and I imagine the numbers would be astounding.

I am a mid-thirties, southern white male and though I learned how to use rifles and pistols in my youth through responsible parenting and hunter's safety course, I have ABSOLUTELY no need for a weapon other than a large stick and I refuse to live each day of my life in fear of some imagined threat that is bolstered by media saturation or fear of the "other". But then again, I went and got a fancy, liberal college edjumacation.

I have no gun, and I am not afraid.

gun ownership. If men stopped the gun buying, the gun industry would be in dire straits.