Moving from middle-class suburbs in CA to rural Arkansas to inner-city CA was fascinating.
I am baffled at how the people I know now react to the existence of guns. I don't shoot; I have fired a gun I think twice in my life (once as a teen; my stepbrother insisted; I fired into the woodpile and my hand hurt for the rest of the day; once as an adult, a black-powder renfaire gun at a training exercise). I have no interest in having or using a gun, nothing but the vaguest ideas of safety or maintenance... but I can't believe people get ALL FREAKED OUT over guns, but not cars.
Cars kill a lot more people in the U.S. than guns. Cars get mishandled a lot more, have more accidents from bad maintenance, are owned and used in violation of the law (my state requires insurance, which a lot of people don't carry), and there's no movement to remove cars or restrict their ownership by psych evaluation, just a constant string of demands to spot the individuals most likely to misuse them, and remove those people's access.
I want guns to be treated the same way: Presume that almost everyone is *likely* capable of using one safely, require some training and licensing to get that permission, and have a long list of acts that can remove that permission, based on statistics about likelihood of danger to others.
And they don't belong in classrooms "in case of shooters" any more than police vans belong on football fields "in case of riots." Being able to construct a situation where that would be the perfect tool does not mean that's a useful allocation of resources, nor that there aren't hundreds of other potential situations where the tool just makes everything worse.
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I am baffled at how the people I know now react to the existence of guns. I don't shoot; I have fired a gun I think twice in my life (once as a teen; my stepbrother insisted; I fired into the woodpile and my hand hurt for the rest of the day; once as an adult, a black-powder renfaire gun at a training exercise). I have no interest in having or using a gun, nothing but the vaguest ideas of safety or maintenance... but I can't believe people get ALL FREAKED OUT over guns, but not cars.
Cars kill a lot more people in the U.S. than guns. Cars get mishandled a lot more, have more accidents from bad maintenance, are owned and used in violation of the law (my state requires insurance, which a lot of people don't carry), and there's no movement to remove cars or restrict their ownership by psych evaluation, just a constant string of demands to spot the individuals most likely to misuse them, and remove those people's access.
I want guns to be treated the same way: Presume that almost everyone is *likely* capable of using one safely, require some training and licensing to get that permission, and have a long list of acts that can remove that permission, based on statistics about likelihood of danger to others.
And they don't belong in classrooms "in case of shooters" any more than police vans belong on football fields "in case of riots." Being able to construct a situation where that would be the perfect tool does not mean that's a useful allocation of resources, nor that there aren't hundreds of other potential situations where the tool just makes everything worse.