This is a follow up to the post I did yesterday about my feeling on RKBA. [View all]

[upaloopa]

This does not have as much to with gun rights or the 2nd Amendment but I think it is a part of the discussion that I haven’t read much about here on DU that I think needs to be talked about. This is what I think. I don’t know what other people think that may have been in my situation because I have never talked about this before with anyone.
My guess is that if George Zimmerman is acquitted he will never carry a gun again and he will never play neighborhood watch again. It’s not because he doesn’t want to get into that kind of trouble, but because he’s had time to think about who Trayvon Martin was. The guy Zimmerman thought he killed was in reality a fantasy that he created in his mind. Had he known then what he knows now about Trayvon, he would never have shot him.
One morning in Vietnam during Tet I volunteered to be part of a body count detail. This was after an attack on Bien Hoa air base the night before. We were supposed to look for any kind of documents or information that might be there. Sometimes there would be a family picture which forced you to see this body as a person similar to yourself.
The point I am trying to make is that to kill someone I think you have to first dehumanize them. In your mind you have to justify killing them. Usually the justification is self-defense. In a war zone you had long ago dehumanized anyone who you felt would be trying to kill you.
Now project that onto a society where people carry guns because they feel the need to defend themselves. If what I am saying is true then they have dehumanized anyone they feel would be trying to kill them. The more people carry guns the more dehumanizing goes on. That’s why a guy can kill a teen playing loud music or a guy can kill a woman who got out of her car because his wheel chair hit her car or a cop in Cleveland, who needed to reload, can fire over 30 rounds into a Black couple who he was in a car chase with. That’s a lot of dehumanizing going on.
Sure you could risk not dehumanizing someone who maybe you should have but then to lesson that risk you have to go through life dehumanizing just about everyone you don’t know. Is that what we want society to become? We could be turning pieces of our country into war zones.