re: #328 Renaissance_Man

If Americans really treated guns as tools, they would be virtually gone from society. Any tool that serves no essential function and causes tens of thousands of deaths and even more injuries every year has no place in the household.

But Americans don’t think guns are tools. They treat them as magic totems of a sacred religion, that are givers of life, law and freedom. And as such, they cannot be questioned or impugned, and cannot be implicated with anything negative. And the only acceptable suggestion is to have more of them, because suggesting otherwise displeases the sacred Gun.

This is my big thing with CCW. I have been really unnerved since finding out how incredibly lax the standards are for who can get and keep a CCW in many states. The counterargument to this is “Well, most CCW owners never get into any trouble or have accidents, so what’s the problem?” To me, that’s backwards: The only purpose of carrying around a gun is to use it in a crisis situation. If you can’t prove that you can use it in a crisis situation, then the gun is useless, not a tool, just an accessory, and a dangerous one.

This actually applies to people who keep guns for home self-defense, too, though obviously it’s a much more limited set of crisis situations that have be dealt with.