Please point out where I said they were bad. If I thought that, I'd have to get rid of mine.
Primary purpose of a car is transportation; people misuse them (mostly accidentally) to harm others. A car isn't *designed* to kill. A firearm is. This is not intrinsically bad; it's just the nature of the tool.
Society recognizes that potential harm a car can do, and establishes training and licensing requirements. All things being equal, the same sort of thing would make sense for firearms. However, the Founding Fathers felt that gun ownership is a fundamental right, and I do not question their judgement.
While society shouldn't try to bar private, law-abiding gun ownership, society *should* be emphasizing gun safety. One of the more positive things out of the NRA are its gun-safety programs; I was a member of an NRA youth rifle team way back in the dawn o' time.
During high school, driver's safety courses were mandatory. Gun safety courses should also become part of the curriculum. If nothing else, it might tend to de-mysticize guns; make them less of a forbidden fruit. Knew a kid back in high school who was disemboweled by a shotgun; parents were gone, and the kid and his friend dug out the gun and started playing with it. Decent training might have made him respect the weapon a bit more. I know our Range Safety Officer put the fear of gawd into
me...
So, last year, about 20,000 people in the US were killed with guns. If pressure cooker fatalities came within two orders of magnitude of that, you'd certainly see changes instituted.
In any case, it's a ridiculous argument. Deny a terrorist a pressure cooker, and he'll build a bomb into something else. Deny a lunatic a gun, and the odds are overwhelming that he'll choose a less-fatal weapon. Certainly not one that'll kill ten people in as many seconds.
But this does illustrate my fundamental concern: Stupid analogies and goofy logic used to defend gun ownership. I support private ownership of firearms; I neither want to see universal registration nor the requirement that the government must approve a law-abiding citizen's decision to arm himself.
People forget there are three sides to this issue: There are the people in favor of private gun ownership, there are the people who want to take the guns away, and there is the
vast mass of people in the middle. Those are the people you must convince...preaching to the choir is no help.
A good many of those people in the middle aren't stupid. They can see the logical fallacies of claims that pressure cookers are just as dangerous as firearms. Such an argument doesn't help; it even hurts by making the pro-gun side look ridiculous.
For those who wish to interject that the OTHER side uses the same sort of stupid logic: yes, some of them do. But that's not the side I want to win. I want to hear arguments from the pro-gun side that doesn't make me wince. It happens, but not often enough.
*Trained* folks with guns are defending our freedoms. There is a difference. I really prefer not to get downrange of the others.