"jim rozen" wrote in message
...
In article , Ed Huntress says...

You don't show the gun, you don't announce your
intentions. You just shoot them. Robbery over.

I didn't say "brandish." But what you're suggesting isn't much of a
deterrent. They're too dead to be deterred, like Justice Thomas's
Constitution.

I wasn't arguing about deterrance of course. I think that in
this regard, gunners approach to the issue is (gasp) correct.
They are a tool, and like any other tool there is a right way
and a wrong way to use guns. Displaying or brandishing them
seems counterproductive. Used in that mode they probably cause
more problems than they solve.

When people start talking about their justifications for the 2nd Amendment,
things usually get slippery. First, the typical ones talk about keeping our
own government from lapsing into tyrany. Then comes protection against
outside invaders. Individual self-defense comes into the picture at some
convenient point, and that has two branches that lead off in different
directions themselves: concealed carry, and the "everybody knows that
eveyone has a shotgun at home in this town," "deterrence" argument, which we
just dabbled in.

There's nothing wrong with these ideas in principle, and they all can be
discussed reasonably. The frustrating part is that they tend to leap from
one to the other when the discussion takes a turn that they find
inconvenient.

To use one of Gunner's analogies, it's like herding cats. They want to go
off in all directions at once before any individual issue is fully explored.

--
Ed Huntress