"hero" shot trying to save someone

[Dark Jaguar]

:D Actually I was making fun of that odd mindset I've come across that, more than people having the right to own guns, people have the DUTY to own them. To put it bluntly, some seem to suggest that if I don't actively purchase a gun myself, I must be against the whole thing. I simply have no desire to bother with it. I had a BB gun as a kid, and my dad taught me (as well as my siblings) basic safety and all that (to the extreme, I'd never seen him as angry as when he saw someone violating a gun safety protocol, and he wasn't the sort to not share this with strangers he observed). However, I've never been very outdoorsy (though I do find his series of comedy books ABOUT being outdoorsy very funny), so after time deleted that BB gun (as well as a greater loss to me, a pretty decent telescope, and some chemistry set, and a microscope, wait I still have that last one actually, somewhere) I never wanted to get another. My current self defense strategy is to avoid dangerous situations, and it's worked pretty fine. (Incidentally, my mother's idea for the best strategy to cleaning up a ruined urban gang war zone is military occupation. I forsee major political fallout from such a practice, not the least of which would be major riots involving both the innocent and guilty alike in those areas.)

I think that basically there's too much emotional knee jerk reactions to this issue. On the one hand you have the bunch that feels like their only means of protecting themselves is being forcibly removed by "the man" and they'll be defenseless from that point on. On the other hand you have the those that are convinced a gun in anyone's hand is just a death waiting to happen and that everything must be done to reduce the number of armaments in favor of saving human lives. There's a point to be had by both. Now I've said before that the "we need to be equipped so that we can rebel against the government" argument is rendered void by the fact that even if you give people fully automatic weapons, the government has tomahawk missiles, stealth bombers, frickin' tanks, and oh yes, the NUKE. We aren't overthrowing JACK unless we get THAT sort of fire power, and no, I'm pretty sure even the most extreme gun rights advocates don't want the average person to be able to go down to the local tank dealership and take out a loan on one of those puppies, perhaps fit it with an audio jack for their iPod, rig up a mini-fridge for drinks, pimp it out with underlighting and lights all up along the treads, maybe a liscense plate saying "My other tank is Galactus". That just leaves the other arguments for owning a gun, basically self defense, hunting and keeping the king of england out of your face, if he showed up... and existed.

Those aren't necesarily laughable things (except the kingy ding one, we're allies now and our country is pretty much impregnable against foreign invasion. Cannot. Be. Pregnated. Also terrorist attacks are of the sort you don't really shoot at to stop). So, really, it's (and this should be obvious) a complicated issue.