re: #158 Renaissance_Man

One of the usual tropes trolled out by the usual fools is that guns are just a tool, just an object, and it’s the people that are bad. That’s pretty obviously false on its face. We regulate other dangerous objects and behaviours. Such regulation is not perfect or 100% effective, but neither is making murder illegal. Any other dangerous object gets treated accordingly, but not guns. Because guns aren’t just an object in the US, they are sacred fetishes. And the price of this particular religion is thousands of lives lost, tens of thousands more permanently altered, and thousands of families devastated.

Imagine if we treated terrorist attacks like gun massacres. There’d be no security checks, no rules about what you can bring onto a plane, and if a bomb went off or a plane got hijacked every month, we’d all shrug, tut-tut about it, and go about our business. And any mention of maybe not allowing everyone to carry weapons onto planes or maybe walk through a metal detector occasionally would be considered the foulest heresy. And idiots would say ‘well, you can’t stop terrorist attacks, so why infringe on our rights?’

I recall that one of the arguments from this trope was to issue every person who boarded the airplane a firearm unless they were already carrying.