I'll share a personal story where owning weapons almost got me into a lot of trouble. Mental illness doesn't run in my family, it gallops. My first degree family is alright, but from cousins outward, it is a cesspool of bipolar, schizophrenia, personality disorders, and substance abuse.

My mother encouraged me to hang around with my "family," and because I was young and stupid, I listened. Well, my cousins have that type of paranoid-schizophrenia where people flip from being your best friend to a mortal enemy at the drop of a hat. Anyway, my cousin started problems with a group of people and one of my female cousin's boyfriends took a rifle that I owned and pointed it at some people, which happened to be detective's kids. Needless to say, I ended up in hand cuffs and every gun I owned ended up confiscated during the investigation.

Somehow in the build up to the trial the cousins decided that I had "turned states evidence" against them. Using their logic, that if the boyfriend had pointed a gun at someone and went to jail, they would report that I had pointed a gun at them. Lucky for me, when the S.O. showed up to investigate not only did I have an alibi for where I was at the time, the SO had every gun I owned, so the whole case was dismissed.

If I'd of had a rifle at all, things might have been very different.