| The gun is as scary as the person in whose hands it sits. And unless it's in the hands of someone I know pretty well, I'm not feeling so good to know there's a gun in their hands. It's true that many people have cars, who should not have them, and those kill too- but at least cars are good for peaceful purposes. The purpose of a gun is to kill. If you aren't in the country hunting, then you've got it to kill a human. I'm not sure who wouldn't be scared to know other people, people whose background and motives they do not know, have guns on them. It seems to me the only rational course IS to be scared, and that is of course, the whole NRA notion of criminals being too scared to commit crimes. The whole NRA strategy rests on the proposition that guns ARE scary in the hands of the citizenry. The problem, of course, is that the citizenry are not a well regulated militia- or well regulated at all. We have a mess of people who own guns, and many of them are nutty, in their various ways, many of them are untrained or under trained with their weapons, many store their weapons unsafely, and many of them get their weapons stolen. It's a mess. And anyone who isn't a little bit scared by the mess hasn't considered it carefully. |
