Originally Posted by logtroll
The Gun Culture isn’t exactly rational. As with many things human, it’s shortsighted and not at all thought out. It also stems from a bouquet of wildly contradictory personality disorders - fear, authoritarianism, paranoia, narcissism, emotionalism, hard heartedness…
A few weeks ago when I was posting on the Original Liberal Forum I got into an exchange where I had revealed that I have some guns left over from my youth but I haven’t shot any of them in 45 years, and that I never in my life thought of my guns as self-defense weapons. I also jokingly said that I’m not even sure where they are.

The first scattershot of replies were: I was lying about having any guns; I wasn’t competent enough to have guns; I was putting the lives of everyone within spitting distance in danger because my guns aren’t properly stored. My opponents actually seemed to know more about me than I do (and it turns out I’m a pretty bad character!)

But one GC guy asked a serious question, “Are you saying that you don’t fear what’s out there and that’s why you don’t have a gun for self-defense?”

“Yup.”

Well, that set him off on a sometimes heated, always passionate, sales pitch on why I should be afraid, so much so that I was being foolish and irresponsible by not being prepared to pop a cap in the evildoers at the drop of a hat.

I knew that ‘discussion’ with the guy was a dead end, but of course I wanted to take coup if possible, so I said I was sorry to not be afraid, but that the numbers just don’t indicate that I need to be - and packing a gun probably wouldn’t get me out of the trouble that was statistically never going to appear anyway.

I bit my tongue on adding that I hoped he would open carry so that it would be easier to identify him as a dangerous nutcase, giving me more opportunity to avoid him and a potentially bad situation.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller