Grasping at guns (Grabbing guns is grasping at straws)

National Post - Canada ^ | Mon 16 Oct 2006 | Lorne Gunter

[umgud]

Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.

[GMMAC]

PING!

[Mr. Mojo]

"Because no one can accurately predict who among us will become unhinged enough to commit bloody slaughter, I believe guns shouldn't be available to the public."

How about cars, or knives, or chainsaws, or.......

Gun-grabbers aren't the clearest thinkers, to put it mildly.

[Zack Nguyen]

"no more guns. Because no one can accurately predict who among us will become unhinged enough to commit bloody slaughter, I believe guns shouldn't be available to the public."

It is amazing how liberals have so much faith in themselves to regulate our lives through social engineering, but have so little faith in their fellow citizens.

[shekkian]

Beverly Akerman suggested a "simple" response to the crime: "no more guns. Because no one can accurately predict who among us will become unhinged enough to commit bloody slaughter, I believe guns shouldn't be available to the public."

Meanwhile she has absolutely no solution to the mental state these people possess.

[D.P.Roberts]

Oh yeah, and they pay attention to mommy like she's got a clue.

[raftguide]

An interesting study would be to see if the political leanings of all these unhinged people were rightward or leftward.

[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

Keep it up lefties. I'll send $100 to the NRA if you keep it up.

[EdReform]

Outlawing civilian possession of firearms might give worried people the sense something is being done to make them safer. But that would just be a false sense of security.

Will 'Gun Control' Make You Safer?

Do Gun Prohibitionists Have a Mental Problem?

Death by Gun Control: The Human Cost of Victim Disarmament

[Leisler]

Funny how these shoothtings never happen in a off duty cop bar or a real nasty biker bar, on Army bases, or in a gun store.

[Rakkasan1]

"Because no one can accurately predict who among us will become unhinged enough to commit bloody slaughter"...

while I agree with this statement, it's also untrue that police and military members never become "unhinged" enough to commit murder.

[shekkian]

No one in his right mind would lean left.

[Puppage]

Gun-grabbers aren't the clearest thinkers, to put it mildly.

Becuase it's all about feeeeeeeeelings.

[theBuckwheat]

>>
Since Ms. Akerman's commentary, this paper has run half a dozen letters (and received perhaps a dozen more) from professors, psychologists, health care workers and gun control advocates all calling for a gun ban, or at least wondering aloud why ordinary people should be permitted to own such destructive objects.
<<

This begs the same "logic" for rapists, as I presume that Ms. Akerman herself has the equipment to commit that sexual offense against a perfectly innocent person, maybe even a harmless child.

Putting that aside, I observed during my own state's debate over allowing civilians to be licensed to carry concealed weapons, that liberals often project their own private, personal, dark fears about how they would behave if they carried a firearm.

Indeed, in some conversations and published opinion pieces, they give strong hints they fear their own inability to be able to control themselves. So they project this fear onto everyone else.

This is the only mindset that explains how emotional they can be in this debate: "We must not allow anyone to carry a weapon because if I carried, I fear I might abuse it."

[tubasonum]

"no more guns"

And also no more knives, baseball bats, and many, many other objects used in crimes.

[tubasonum]

"Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars."

Or like trying to reduce chronic depression by repeating "have a nice day" to a troubled individual.

[Sender]

They could just as well say that eliminating all men would end gun violence. I hate to admit it but it's true; most gun crimes are done by men. So just kill all the men.

Makes about as much sense as trying to gather up hundreds of millions of guns.

[EdReform]

Putting that aside, I observed during my own state's debate over allowing civilians to be licensed to carry concealed weapons, that liberals often project their own private, personal, dark fears about how they would behave if they carried a firearm.

Raging Against Self Defense: A Psychiatrist Examines The Anti-Gun Mentality by Sarah Thompson, M.D.

"... About a year ago I received an e-mail from a member of a local Jewish organization. The author, who chose to remain anonymous, insisted that people have no right to carry firearms because he didn't want to be murdered if one of his neighbors had a "bad day". (I don't know that this person is a "he", but I'm assuming so for the sake of simplicity.) I responded by asking him why he thought his neighbors wanted to murder him, and, of course, got no response. The truth is that he's statistically more likely to be murdered by a neighbor who doesn't legally carry a firearm¹ and more likely to be shot accidentally by a law enforcement officer.¹

How does my correspondent "know" that his neighbors would murder him if they had guns? He doesn't. What he was really saying was that if he had a gun, he might murder his neighbors if he had a bad day, or if they took his parking space, or played their stereos too loud. This is an example of what mental health professionals call projection – unconsciously projecting one's own unacceptable feelings onto other people, so that one doesn't have to own them.³ In some cases, the intolerable feelings are projected not onto a person, but onto an inanimate object, such as a gun,⁴ so that the projector believes the gun itself will murder him..."

[GMMAC]

Although "kill all the men" enjoys considerable support within feminist circles as the solution to virtually all problems, "morph them into emasculated wallets" appears to be the more 'mainstream' position.