That kind of depends on where I am and who the bomber belongs to. I’m sure that there are plenty of countries where bombers in the sky are not a welcome sight.
All the same, I’d still rather people were psychologically tested to decide their gun-ownership worthiness, than have it based on their ability to clean and maintain their weapon and be able to point it at things and hit them accurately.
Kalhoun (she) has seen too many instances where a loaded gun, intended to protect the family, was found and unintentionally implemented in the act of hurting an innocent person. The intent to kill was clearly not there, but innocent people were killed anyway. Training and intent are immaterial at this point.
What screws up the whole argument for me is the unwillingness of gun nuts to admit it often goes wrong and innocent people die as a result.
They remind me of pitbull owners, who fall back on the argument that the dog is not inherently bad just hasn’t been trained properly. Except how many times do we see some tearful dog owner on the evening news saying, “Gosh, he’s never done anything like this before, he’s always been so good till now.” Little consolation if it’s your child that’s been mauled. And yet, talk to a pit bull owner and they will refuse to believe that it could happen with their dog. “I know my dog!” Yeah, kind like those people I saw on the news, they were just as certain, yet a child has been mauled.
People who have access to guns go off and kill innocent people when tempers run high, turn on the news. Access to guns in the home is at the root of almost every school shooting to date.
In my town, a cop went off, shot his ex girlfriend, (also a cop), then turned the gun on himself. A cop, with 20 yrs experience! It happens, though gun owners choose not to see it as affecting them in any way. Because of the “I know my dog” kind of thinking. Your willful ignorance only unsettles non gun nuts the more.
I don’t want you bringing a gun into my home, not because I’m afraid of your gun, I’m afraid of you. Not because I don’t know and trust you. Because, unlike you, I can see that ‘shit happens’, all the time and innocent people die as a result. I don’t want that to be my family, thanks anyway.
People who own guns, like to reference their guns, jokingly, sarcastically whatever.
It’s not really guns that frighten me it’s the people who are attracted to them. Will they all end up taking an innocent life? Certainly not. But some will. Gun nuts refuse to acknowledge that as a legitimate cause for fear.
It’s perfectly legal for people to carry weapons at presidential rallies, and I consider that to be terrorism. I don’t like the threat. I don’t like having to wonder if the asshole with the impaired judgement is a lunatic.
We’ve all heard the cliche and it’s meaningless. It’s like saying “airplanes don’t fly, people fly.”
I don’t think that’s necessary. I’d prefer the laws keeping mentally ill people from owning guns were strengthened. And you don’t have to prove you’re a good shot to own a gun.
Problem is, you never know when a previously sane person is going to go 'round the bend. Nor is previous mental illness necessarily an indicator of current or future mental illness.
It’s not a good idea to make laws about what a person might hypothetically do, though.
Same as above. But I do think someone with a history of mental illness is more likely to have a mental illness problem than somebody without that history.
So why don’t people react the same way, with a manifest physical fear, to bows and arrows? Or swords, daggers and other knives? Poisons? Something makes firearms different in your brain over and above these others things designed simply to kill and I’m curious what it is. To be frank I have never understood why there aren’t more people phobic of the last (poison) as it has the greatest potential to kill you without human intervention.
I don’t really have a problem with guns, or most gun owners. However,
Some people really like power tools. They love cutting things with circular saws and chain saws. These are potentially dangerous tools that demand car be taken while using, and even still sometimes maim and kill experienced users. Many people fear these tools and have never used one and feel very nervous around them. But very few power saw users in my experience feel much need or desire to convince a non-user to try using and appreciating a power saw they way many gun enthusiasts do with guns. I’m not sure why, just an observation.
Actually, in my experience, no ------- people who literally cannot enter my home because of their phobia of the firearms I keep and use have no problems attending air shows with military aircraft present, touring things like battleships, visiting a museum with various arms and armor present, or going through a military base (back when things like that were allowed). There is something specific to civilian ownership of firearms, of all the deadly weapons and substances possible, that brings on the strongest and most deep-seated fears.
I grew up in a rough neighborhood in Renaissance Italy, and we lived in constant fear of drive-by poisonings.
Unlike many gun owners, I am perfectly willing to state that most guns are weapons. There are a few specialized types that were designed from the very beginning for some other purpose. Most were designed as military weapons (or derived from them), or as hunting weapons, or as personal defense weapons. This is a matter of historical fact.
Now, here’s the thing: Sometimes people need to be shot.
Interesting point - I think maybe golfers are the only people I’ve seen compare to gun enthusiasts in their devotion to evangelizing about their hobby and in trying to convince people that everyone should be interested in this. 
Oh yes, just wanted to address the ‘guns can be used for hunting food’ defense. C’mon. A huge proportion of the American population doesn’t live near anywhere that you’d be able to do this legally, and wouldn’t know how to efficiently bring down a game animal - or what gun to do it with - if you drew them a diagram. And I’m saying this with my husband being a hunter, having hunted deer up until a year or two ago, and with me being accustomed to preparing game meat for dinners, and having grown up in an area of Wisconsin where relatives would plan family get-togethers and weddings around deer season. Sure, certain guns could be used for that, but damned few people ever will.
That is without a doubt the most ill-timed and asinine observation I have seen in a good while. I don’t know what you were thinking when you submitted this, but I’d ask that if the urge strikes you again you stop and rethink it. It’s statements like this that undo hours/months/weeks/years of patient and reasoned discussion, and in a thread as generally inflammatory as this one you have just destroyed any goodwill that may have been left.
Good job, thanks for the help, and please don’t help out any more. With friends like you, who needs enemies?
Take it to The Pit, flyboy. I’m not here to be your friend and I’m weary of 2A “supporters” who make themselves into hypocrites trying to be nice to antis.
Fact: Guns are weapons.
Fact: The 2nd Ammendment exists specifically because the Founding Fathers wanted the people to have lethal force at their disposal in the event of tyranny.
Dance around that all you like, it will still be the facts and the antis will still want to disarm you.
I’ll give you a hint on the difference. The battleship is not going shoot me.
I don’t worry about knives, because to kill someone with a knife you need to really want to. I consider myself a generally likeable fellow, who doesn’t tend to induce murderous thoughts. The danger of getting caught in a knifing crossfire is pretty limited.
I don’t have much of an issue with hunting rifles or guns used for other purposes. It really creeps me out when people start talking about needing guns to protect their freedom or for personal defense. Now there are some people for whom having/carrying a pistol is probably a good idea: couriers, policemen, or people being stalked. But bringing a gun into the house increases the chance that you or someone you love will be injured or die, so a rational person would see the need as very rare.
The current gun fetish is not a traditional American value. When I was growing up, guns kept at home were for hunting or target shooting. Now what I see on-line are people fantasizing about using guns to kill people. They want to know if what caliber has the best stopping power, whether shotguns are better for home defense, or deciding what are the best weapons to stockpile to shoot people who represent the US govt. You people are nuts, and yes I am afraid of you.
I don’t want you cleaning you guns next door because some of you are stupid enough to leave a round in there and shoot yourself or me through the wall. I don’t want bar fights or road range incidents turning into shootings on a regular basis. But mostly, I find you creepy and kind of pathetic. Kind of like the grown guy who collects Star War figurines, except you do it with things that are associated with murder and warfare and may end up killing me or someone I know.
and that is, perhaps part of the reason people fear guns. My sister committed suicide with one, and was suicidal for most of my life. I have a history of guns making me nervous because of the threat they represented. Sure the gun isn’t going to act on its own- but its the possibilities that it represents. A friend of my sisters killed her husband by shooting him repeatedly and then forcing her daughter at gunpoint to help her dispose of the body (she’s in jail with a life sentence- could be out by now for all I know.) She seemed to be the most together person I had ever known.
You can’t get a logical reason for a phobia- it is a contradiction in terms. Most emotional reactions have a bit of an illogical component. However, any of the three issues I described above could make me uncomfortable around guns. You never know what is in someones background.
There is a character in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil who carries around vials that he claim contain enough poison to poison the whole cities water supply. **If **you actually believed this preposterous claim, would the vial make you nervous- even assuming it was made of something essentially unbreakable? If not, could you understand why other people would be made nervous? If so, that is the root of why at least some people are nervous around guns- they understand their primary purpose of guns to be death dealing and have a visceral (yes, illogical) reaction to this, without having a sense of constructive use to counteract this visceral reaction(or at least without enough of a sense of constructive use.)
As to the issue of bombers- most people in Western counties are desensitized by the ubiquitous nature of the sound of airplanes and so probably don’t differentiate one from another. I’ll bet you, however, that people who lived through the blitz (or any continued bombing) didn’t feel that way. In the media, you hear about people being shot much more often than being blown up, so that fits.
For what is worth I have no real issue with most private gun ownership, but I would not choose to move several miles north to Kennesaw, Georgia, where gun ownership is mandatory for all homeowners.