Some letter to the editor or the other suggested that those two guys who were seemingly randomly shot last weekend might still be alive if they'd been allowed to carry guns. This made me wonder how the LW arrived at that conclusion. Someone comes at you with a gun, right? So you pull out your gun. Now you can shoot them. But they can still shoot you. They're no more motivated to drop their gun than you are to drop yours.
Then I realized that this whole "having a gun will protect you from being shot" thing is based on the assumption that you, the good guy, have the superior gun skills. So that's why I had trouble with the concept - I can't identify with having superior skills in anything that requires visual acuity and nerves and steadiness of hand.
And this reminded me of two other areas where there's a similar disconnect - proponents think that you can do it best yourself, whereas I know I can't do it best myself so I would rather leave it to someone else: entrepreneurship, and DIY. Both entrepreneurs and DIY people think "if you want something done right, do it yourself." I think "If I do it myself it won't get done right, but I'd happily give my skills or my money respectively to someone who can do it right."
Which makes me wonder: is there a correlation between being pro-gun and being an entrepreneur? Or between being pro-gun and doing DIY?
1 comment:
Maybe pro-gun and DIY. Maybe. But more likely pro-gun and hasn't-thought-this-through-properly or lacks capacity to do so.
It's catching-up-with-Imp-Strump time!
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