"Handguns...exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing....

[patrice]

260. guns =/= forks =/= pencils =/= cars & pretending that they do ought to disqualify one to own

a gun, because one obviously does not understand the important and essential characteristics of a gun that make it what it is and why, therefore, we don't eat with our guns, nor drive them to work.

The character of the individual using a tool of any type is important to how exactly that tool is used to beneficial or to detrimental effect.

However, a personality that cannot control the desire to eat, or a personality that does not care enough to learn how to spell what it writes, or a personality that is an in-attentive driver does not have the same kind of effect upon the world that a personality that is an ir-responsible gun owner has upon the world. Eating is not the same thing as shooting. Spelling is not the same thing as shooting. Driving can be the closest comparison, but that comparison doesn't work on the basis of the danger to one's self incurred from ir-responsible driving, compared to the relatively small danger to one's self from the effective use of a gun (there's also a matter of frequency in the comparison too, i.e. how many times can you be ir-responsible with a car and get away with it, compared to how many times can you use a gun for what-the-fuck-ever and get away with it).

Plenty of us want to be reasonable about respect for gun ownership rights, but it's silly arguments such as "guns don't kill; people kill" that make that almost impossible, because such arguments reveal that the people making them have no real understanding what guns are, since they compare them to forks.

As I said above: take a bad situation such as what this football player did to his family and keep that situation entirely the same as what actually happen, same sick and/or troubled people with bad histories with one another, all the same problems, but change one thing: no guns in the situation. CLEARLY what the hell ever people are, it IS guns that kill. Even if someone attacks with a knife, the probability of succeeding in killing another person are considerably lower and the consequences of such an attack to the attacker are much DIFFERENT from standing-off at a safe distance and shooting them. If that difference between guns and knives or guns and forks or guns and anything else weren't significant, there would be no guns, or everything would be guns, because the differences wouldn't matter.