stingc

They certainly do have major anger issues, but background checks do not usually filter out such people. The stories I've heard took place in the US. Most spouses will not call the police, and those who do will rarely press charges. The types of people I'm referring to wouldn't really pull the gun with the intention of using it anyway, but rather to intimidate. The problem is that if someone is crazy enough to do something like that, it's not unlikely that an accident will eventually occur.

And you're also right that people like this would be acting violently no matter what. The difference is that giving them a gun makes it much easier for them to kill accidentally. By the way, I'm not necessarily implying that the trigger would be pulled unintentionally, but rather that it was pulled on a momentary impulse that would be immediately regretted. So the same person with a knife would at most give a couple of nasty cuts - certainly not a good thing, but a lot less permanent than most bullet wounds.

Also, giving the sane spouse a gun doesn't help much. They're supposed to shoot their wife/husband? What if the spouse wasn't really intending to shoot, but gets pushed over the line when he/she sees you draw your gun? Then again, you might scare them into putting the gun down, but it's not at all clear that having a gun yourself would help in this case.

The world doesn't neatly split into "criminals" and "responsible citizens." While we'd all agree that the crazy spouse in this story should not own a gun, it would be very hard for any government system to weed them out. They are also not the type of criminal who would seek out a gun beforehand. So making guns illegal would indeed prevent such people from owning them. Of course that would bring up other problems that have been brought up multiple times. If there was an obvious solution to this issue, there wouldn't be so many arguments about it .