An aside from reality

Some people use guns as tools, and some use them as security blankets. The people using them as tools are neutral as threats, because as tools guns may be used either to initiate, or to minimize, violence against others. The security blanket crowd, though, is Universally Dangerous, because they possess a gun for what it represents rather than what it actually does. Such folk imagine guns to function mainly as threats rather than tools of violence, planning if possible in instances of need to use the firearm as a symbol of dominance over someone, like on television. These people are dangerous simply for the fact that if they Do use their weapon, it will be reactive and unplanned, and thus less predictable.

Now, there are those in the world who believe that the security blanket crowd is the only sort of gun owner there is, that the modern world has no proper function for assault weapons in the hands of the general public; even if this assumption doesn't necessarily equate to believing that firearms should be banned entirely, it still undermines the perspective of gun rights advocates as essentially founded on personal insecurities. This isn't really so surprising: just as the Christian brand has been stained by lunatics & the Conservative brand has been stained by bigots, gun owners get to make their arguments from behind the people carrying assault rifles in restaurants & shooting up elementary schools.

I tend to sympathize with efforts to restrict public access to firearms, if only to make competence more of a prerequisite to legal ownership than it currently is, but this is only an outgrowth of my fundamental concern that everyone around me is insane. I understand that some have a great deal of faith in the reliability of the average person to act both righteously and responsibly when confronted with a threatening situation. I think I can only agree that such a person is possible, and that I would aspire to be one if so confronted, but even then I can't say I'm sure how I'd behave; I'll agree that I'd like the right to find out, though, if only because I don't think death is the worst thing out there.