Are guns the answer to a prayer in some U.S. churches?

[Dylan]

.....did you read my post, Spider?

[Spider]

[Dylan]

[Dylan]

[Spider]

I know. Its why I responded as I did. Your positions are specious. Speculative.

Guns have a tremendous stigma around them. People (the ones that don't know any better, anyways) view them as coiled snakes that might just flip out and randomly strike at any moment, and so there is a really overblown set of misapprehensions about them. They are extremely simple tools with extremely simple safety precautions that go with them. If people, through their own stupidity or negligence or both somehow manage to harm themselves with a gun, people seem to find those misapprehensions to be reaffirmed.

Does the same stigma exist around power tools? Statistically, power tools are just about the most dangerous things a person could put their hands onto. More people manage to mangle themselves with drills, saws,, and probably even hammers, than just about anything else. You want to talk negligence? Watch some clown rent a nail gun from Home Depot over a holiday weekend.

We expect guns to be dangerous. We're trained by literally the whole world that they are dangerous from the age we can even conceive of them. Not so much with all the other far more dangerous things to be found around the house. No stigma, less concern.

Its that stigma that actually keeps the rate of gun-related negligence so extremely low, relative to just about everything else.

[Medius]

[Dylan]

What sort of statistics are you looking for?

It's not a personal prejudice, just based on my observations over two decades of living in gun country.

Hint: being smarmy is unlike you. Leave that sort of mud-rolling to people like Saz and I.

[John Galt]

well its anecdotal

[Dylan]

[Spider]

Curious: Where is gun country, exactly? Because I finished high school in an extremely rural ranching community where everyone had a gun. Kids had rifles on racks in their trucks in the school parking lot. They would literally pull over and shoot coyotes of the pastures on their way to school in the mornings.

I'm pretty sure I've got a good idea of what "gun country" is all about. In "gun country" guns really aren't a big deal, and people don't own silly useless guns like an AK-47, much less manage to shoot holes in houses with them, for crying out loud. I'd never even seen a military style firearm in person until I was actually in the military. And rarely had I ever seen a handgun at all. Handguns are mostly useless.

My experience has just been so completely opposite from yours...don't know what to say about it.