Quote:
Originally Posted by frazod
A responsible person with a gun is keenly aware of the consequences of using it. Just because a gun owner gets pissed off doesn't mean he's going to riddle his/her antagonist with bullets just because he/she can.
I've owned a gun of one sort or another all my life. I have a pretty bad temper and for about five years had a serious coke problem. Despite this, during the course of my entire life, I've had occasion to point a gun at another human being twice; both times in self defense. In both cases, the offenders went away rather than get shot (which is the general idea). I've never had to pull the trigger and have never killed anyone. And while there have been occasions where I really, really wanted to turn some asshole into a bullet-riddled corpse, that whole getting thrown in a pound-me-in-the-ass prison for decades thing has always been a strong deterrent to convince me not to do it.
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Again, I'm with you. I just find it hard to believe that everyone will have that same self-control if they were allowed to carry 24-7.
The bottom line is that I don't trust people.
Without getting on a tangent, people can't be trusted to pick up dog poop where dogs aren't allowed, people can't be trusted not to smoke in fire zones (and I live in one and see people smoking all the time. At the lookout point in my avatar, there's a huge no smoking sign though when I walked over there on Friday, people were smoking).
If everyone where as responsible as you and Alan (or even my dad, a 30 year gun owner) I'd have no problem. But the reality is that even if an extremely small percentage of people aren't, we could see hundreds of deaths a year, far more than the tragedies of VaTech and the like.