It's the People WITH GUNS Who Kill People

 At No More Mister Niceblog, aimai gives what-for to the guntard apologists:

Let me break it to you--I am not afraid of guns or of triggers. I'm also not afraid of mice or any other little story you guys tell yourselves about women, or people in cities, or liberals, or people who never owned a gun. I'm afraid of people--I'm afraid of people that I know exist in this world. People who are variously careful, careless, stupid, ill informed, angry, short tempered, lacking in foresight, paranoid, living in close proximity to relatives and friends who may be all of those things, raising children who may be all of those things--people who forget their keys and where they put their rifle, people who punch the walls when they get excited and may pull the trigger under the same impulse, people who leave their guns out where toddlers can grab them and kill themselves.

People are unreliable and people who own guns have something very serious and powerful with which to play out their personal dramas: job loss, old age, dementia, divorce, adolescent angst, quarrels with neighbors.

This is not really that hard to understand. There aren't two kinds of people in the world: people who have fond memories of dad and huntin' in the back forty and the rest of us "know nothings," gun owners and non gun owners. There are simply people who acknowledge that on balance people are not reliable 100 percent of the time--they are not in control of their own emotions, let alone of the circumstances in which they may find themselves. We have to legislate for the safety of the majority, not for the pleasure of the minority.

We routinely control, as a society, many things that give people pleasure--drugs, sex, property use--hell, you can't even burn leaves in my town--because in society one person's pleasure may lead to another person's harm.  If you want to make a Second Amendment absolutist argument be my guest--but if you want to make in on the grounds that your hazy memories of feeling safe pulling the trigger with daddy gives your gun ownership primacy over my hazy memories of being able to drop my kindergartners off for school well, fuck you, you don't get to make that argument without some pushback. We get it, we get it, but we don't respect it.

Enough with the "I hunted squirrels with my daddy so I get all the rocket launchers I want and anyone who disagrees just doesn't understand guns" bullshit.

Enough.