The car comparison is actually not bad
The more I think about the car comparison, I think it's apt in the sense that it illustrates something about human behavior and what can really be relied on.

A car could so easily kill a lot of people. Someone could steer it straight into a crowd and kill a dozen in one stroke. This does in fact happen sometimes. People occasionally get road rage and essentially use the car as a weapon against another driver. Or they're just bonkers.

But isn't it something of a miracle how you can stand there and look at cars driving down a busy road all day long, with a sidewalk full of pedestrians, and odds are that not one of those cars will kill any of those people walking only a few steps away from huge machines going 55 mph. The vast majority of people seem to be remarkably sane and responsible with these very dangerous tools.

So it is with firearms. Here in my home state of Virginia, there are over 30,000 people with special permits to carry concealed weapons. They are walking around with handguns every day. And yet it's been years since anybody with one of those permits committed a crime with their weapon. Each year millions of firearms are sold in the US and only a tiny fraction of them will ever be used to commit a crime or harm any person. Most people can apparently be trusted not to lose their shit and point either the car or the gun at another person.

It is true that most firearms are designed to put a hole through a living thing and injure or kill it. Not all - many are designed specifically for target shooting purposes. It's an Olympic sport, don't forget. But if having the theoretical ability to cause serious harm to another living thing should be illegal, then how about teaching martial arts? We all generally accept that the ability of innocent people to defend themselves against threats to their safety is legitimate. Thus this idea about guns having no 'legitimate' purpose is a canard.

Then there is hunting for food, which is the next best thing, ethically speaking, to being a vegetarian. Just because you may live in an urban area where 'the grownups' provide all of your food pre-packaged for you doesn't mean that this is the reality for the rest of the world. The UK differs from the US in this respect because you have exterminated most of your native wildlife long ago and what is left is mostly quite scarce. But in America, our white tailed deer, elk and pronghorn antelope have booming populations. There is free non-endangered food running around everywhere and if you live some place where hunting is practical then you'd be a fool not to start eating it.

With beef averaging about $7 a pound and a typical yield of 50 pounds of meat per deer, the value of one deer is $350 in grocery cash that is then freed up for other things. My cost: one cartridge from my thirty ought six. About seventy five cents. The 6 deer that I shot in my backyard last season, butchered and put in the freezer are thus worth about $2,100.

Result.
(Zupper, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 18:19, Reply)