perplexed by the fear of guns

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

There have been a number of gun threads percolating even in our more gentle MPSIMS and IMHO forums of late, and they have reminded me of something that has has been puzzling me ever since I started shooting.

I would like to offer this thread as a safe and non-judgemental place to talk about it. We have plenty of other opportunities to discuss elsewhere what the laws should be regarding firearms.

As a shooter, I take pleasure in introducing other people to my hobby. And yet, I have noticed, both in person and in discussions here and elsewhere, that some people are very frightened of guns.

There was a lady for whom I have considerable respect. She was brought up on a cattle ranch. She is an accomplished athlete, rider, mountain climber, skier, downhill mountain biker, has sufficient knowledge of martial arts to more than take care of herself in a fight, and was not the least daunted by a 6 week trip alone with her husband through South Africa and Namibia. She works as a fitness trainer at my gym. So, you get the point, this is no shrinking violet. She had agreed to come shooting with her husband. When I introduce people to shooting, I take it very slowly. We start with a toy plastic gun, and go over the safety rules, and practise basic manipulations with the toy. Then, we move on to touching and handling the real guns, but with no ammunition in the room, just inert dummy training rounds called snap caps. We don’t even go to the range until the next day. So my otherwise intrepid, adventurous lady did fine with the plastic toy, but when I brought out the real one, she experienced rapid breathing, incipient nausea, dizziness, all caused, she admitted, by an overwhelming fear and urge to leave the room. Needless to say, she went home shortly thereafter.

Another lady, a doper who accepted my offer to try shooting in fact, made it to the range, and was able to overcome rapid breathing and hand tremors to shoot two magazines of .22 before needing a smoke and a little break.

I hear many people say they would not want a person who had a licence to carry a pistol, and had therefore passed screening as fit to do so, to enter their house, presumably out of concern for the wellbeing of their family and them. Yet, I think, the same people have no problem walking with their family on a sidewalk besides a stream of cards being driven by people who have not undergone criminal background checks or been screened for psychiatric history. We still routinely hear of pedestrians being killed by cars on the news.

We all have things in our homes that could be used in deadly ways: kitchen knives, sports implements, power tools,appliances, flammable, toxic or explosive chemicals, electricity. I already aluded to the lethal potential of cars. We don’t let kids play with these, we take precautions when handling them, yet they hardly cause the level of fear I descibed above.

I suppose guns are unfamiliar to many people, and they have this huge cultural baggage tied to them by all the media and entertainment we watch. And yet, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something more, something that I’m missing, that can lead to this kind of fear. I don’t think any less of people with this fear. Heck, I have a huge fear of something far less dangerous, singing solo in public. But I would like to understand it better. Can you please enlighten me?

2

I am perplexed anyone even thinks about guns in a regular basis.

3

What you said. I’ve also never met anyone who fears guns as a physical object, out of the hands of another person, so hearing that they exist is strange. Then again, I’m afraid of spiders and centipedes, so I guess it’s not so odd.

4

Gun’s aren’t common here (Australia), at least not in the way they are in the US, The only people who have handguns in their homes or in public are cops and criminals. At football games (AFL at the Gabba if any Australians are curious) I’ve noticed that the police don’t even carry. That said though I really can’t imagine being frightening of an unloaded gun but if someone handed me a gun I would handle it very carefully, as i have no desire to shoot myself and have no experience handling guns.

5

I’m not trying to offend, but there’s no other way to say it–they kill people. They are made to kill, and they’re really really good at doing that. And that’s scary.

6

You’re really perplexed? You really don’t understand?

What is so perplexing about the fact that some people, when confronted by an object whose primary, indeed virtually sole, purpose is to kill, might be afraid of it? You can trot out all the other potentially dangerous objects that you like - cars, electricity, power tools, chemicals, whatever - but the fact is that all of those things have primary purposes that do not involve killing or injuring people. If you get killed in a car accident, it’s an unfortunate side-effect of the actual purpose of the car. If you get shot and die, the gun has done exactly what it was created to do. Why is it so hard to believe that some people find this a bit frightening?

Look, i recognize that guns are, in many ways, simply tools. I’ve fired guns; i’ve even used them to kill (animals, not people). I don’t have any special fear of them, unless someone is actually threatening to point one at me. But i also comprehend quite easily why some people have the reactions that they do to guns.

And you also partly answered your own question when you made a reference to the media. The media make people scared of plenty of relatively harmless things. Some people are scared of black people because of what they see on TV. Some are scared to visit cities. Some get plastic wrap and duct tape and seal their houses. Some freak out about things like H1N1 that pose virtually no threat apart from a few miserable days in bed. Why is it so surprising that people develop a fear of guns?

7

Being nervous around firearms is not completely irrational. People do get shot and killed or seriously injured by firearms every day. Obviously being terrified of a firearm is extreme. But so is pretending a firearm is completely non-dangerous.

8

Well, to play devil’s advocate a bit: what is a gun basically used for? To bring death to another living creature, either in a pretend way (shooting range) or a real way (hunting, war, murder). That’s the reason for its invention and existence, full stop. Some folks have a psychological reaction against instruments explicitly designed to kill; maybe they’d have the same reaction if you invited them to play with your mock-up of a gallows or a guillotene.

9

I’m sorry, but I have to respectfully disagree. Yeah, we’ve all heard the cliche “guns don’t kill people. . .”, but it’s not the inanimate object that does the damage. It’s the intent of the person pulling the trigger. For all intents and purposes, a pistol, rifle, revolver, is just a hunk of steel and/or plastic. I’ve read through the replies through this thread already, and I too have to admit I’m boggled by the self-inflicted panic of people who see the inanimate object.

. . . and DigitalC, no offense man, but I think/hear/see guns every day. It happens.

Tripler
I don’t get it either, but I can accomodate it. . . to a point.

10

No, this is precisely incorrect. It is specifically incorrect “for all intents and purposes,” because the key “intents and purposes” of a gun specifically include killing or injuring a living target.

As i said, i’m happy to think of guns as tools, and i’m only scared of guns if someone actually uses one around me in an aggressive or irresponsible manner, but to argue that a gun is just a hunk of metal and plastic, completely divorced from its central purpose, is totally bizarre.

11

And then you’ll shoot them?

12

This is more than a bit disingenuous. Most people who own firearms in the United States are not licensed or controlled in any way shape or form*. I have no problem with the general concept of licensing for concealed carry. But I’d be a lot more comfortable if all gun ownership was licensed and controlled. I know that it wouldn’t stop all gun violence, but it would make me feel a lot better about it.

For that matter, I’d feel a lot better if licensing and control of automobiles was a lot more effective as well. But that’s not really the point of this thread.

FWIW, I’m not afraid of guns per se and am actually a decent shot. I just have no desire to own one and some of the gun owners in my area scare the crap out of me.

*And bear no resemblance to “a well regulated militia”.

13

Some people can’t look over the railing (or even through glass) of a tall building without viscerally feeling the height.

As for a gun, you can make rational arguments that it’s just metal and plastic, that it’s just for target, etc., but to them the primal connection between guns and death is too strong to break. They may be fine with toys or FPS games, but just as they may be fine with a horror movie yet shirk at the site of an actual operation, some connections persist.

14

Ever see a war memorial in a town square with artillery pieces? Those things are designed only to kill people, and you don’t see people running from them. Or maybe you’ve gone to an airshow and saw a bomber flying overhead. Would you think it was a normal and reasonable reaction to hide?

It doesn’t matter if something is designed for killing. If it’s inherently dangerous to be around - say if someone made a home made bomb, I could see not wanting to be around it. But guns can’t do anything on their own, you have to very deliberately use them to inflict harm.

15

Gun owner/enthusiast here.

But I sort of get it.

With guns, things are great . . . until they are not. I know I would never do anything stupid, so in my hands, it is just a tool. But do I have personal acquaintance with suicides and fatal accidents? Yes, that too.

Are suicides and fatal accidents and for that matter murders older than time? Sure. Guns just make them, in some cases, frightenenly (note the word) more efficient, just like if I were going to organize a genocide that I hoped would fail, I’d hand it over to the Irish, as they’d get drunk and forget to do it, and not to the uncomfortably-efficient Prussian-originated civil service apparatus. The intent and impulses are equally evil and time-insensitive – but guns (German efficiency) make the outcomes worse, in some cases.

16

Suuuure. Every gun related injury and death I’ve ever heard of has been the result of calm deliberation beforehand. Or perhaps not.

17

Except when this happens.

18

If you don’t see the difference between these things and the situation the OP was describing, i probably can’t explain it to you.

19

That’s exceedingly rare.

If you can’t explain it, it’s probably not a valid point. You’re saying that fear of something designed only to kill is rational, then why wouldn’t people have the same reaction to other types of things that were designed solely to kill? Why wouldn’t a warplane flying overhead elicit fear, if it’s based strictly on the notion that things that are designed to kill are inherently unsettling?

20

What he’s trying to get at is that a gun isn’t going to do anything until somebody pulls the trigger, intentionally or otherwise, and that it takes a terrific amount of negligence to 1) allow the gun to point at another person while 2) simultaneously pulling the trigger. The firearm is certainly a factor in the resulting catastrophe, just as an automobile is a factor in a deadly car crash, but the cause is human negligence.

And, of course, truly bizarre accidents can happen. :o It is possible for a very badly-made firearm or one that has been improperly altered (and the article seems to suggest that this may have been the case) to discharge in a situation when the trigger is not engaged. You could probably count on one hand the number of times this has resulted in injury in the last decade, though.

(It’s also worth pointing out that the shooter should not have set the pistol down while it was loaded without at least engaging the safety.)