On 7/31/2015 4:40 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 14:44:00 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

On 7/31/2015 9:14 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2015 22:04:25 -0500, "David R. Birch"
wrote:


Are you trying to miss the point that its not the object, but how it is
used?

I'm trying to point out that your point is fundamentally wrong. If
you're unaware of what can happen with weeping (or "sweating")
dynamite, inanimate or not, you should look it up.

Actually, I do know a bit about it from my dad. Before WWII, he used
dynamite when he worked with a crew dredging Hamilton Harbor in Bermuda.
He said the crates had to be turned regularly to keep the nitro from
weeping. Not a job for the meek. He was about 19 at the time.

Then you should know that inanimate things are not necessarily,
inherently safe. That whole gun-nutz argument is suspect. But more
importantly, it's a silly semantic game.

A game that I am not playing. I do know that inanimate things are not
necessarily, inherently safe. I also know that inanimate things are not
necessarily, inherently dangerous.



Beyond that, to pursue your line of reasoning, you have to ignore the
fact that the greatest danger lies in the unknown answer to the
question, "whose hands are we talking about"?

You may have a gun. I don't know who you are. I don't know about the
state of your mental health. I don't know what you stand for. I don't
know what your behavior has been in the past. I don't know what drugs
you've taken.

Or you may be the same person without a gun. You tell me -- what is
the INHERENT role of the gun in this circumstance?

Since I only may have a gun, the gun has no role. Anyone walking down
the street may have a gun.

I've specified that one person has a gun, and the the other does not.
You may or may not know which is which.

The role of the gun is to elevate the risk you're exposed to in one
situation. Inherently. The elevated danger does not exist without the
presence of the gun.

Now you state it somewhat more clearly, 2 people, 1 has a gun, 1 not and
I don't know which one. Still, I will treat them both the same and no
different from both or none armed, so again the gun has no role. Safest
to assume all are armed and deal accordingly.


This is the silly narrative that has grown out of the gun nutz'
narrative, based on a strawman argument, that people fear guns as
objects. No person I've ever known, and I've known plenty of anti-gun
people, fits that strawman suit. If they fear guns, they fear them
because of what can happen when someone gets his hands on them. Whose
hands?

I have known people with an irrational fear of guns as objects.

Then you know a nuttier bunch of people than I do. Why that is, I
can't guess.

Most of my friends on the left are gun friendly or neutral, but most of
my friends are Mensans who tend to ignore Establishment Left dogma. The
nuts tend to be the ones who can't get around Left or Right dogma.

I don't know many dogmatic people, personally.

I doubt that, unless you live in a bubble.


The reality is that a child was suspended from school because a teacher
thought the bites from his sandwich made it look like something that
resembled a gun.

The horror! Did they kill the kid?

Nope, just more zero tolerance garbage from those taught that policy
overrules wisdom.

I looked that one up. It wasn't a sandwich. It was a pop-tart. d8-)

When pop-tarts are outlawed, etc.




You seem to be developing a tendency to not read very carefully what I
write. This is recent. Are you OK?

I'm just fine. What you're saying is nonsense.

Actually, no, it isn't. Interesting that you aren't seeing anything
else, though.

I see what is really there.

On the surface, yes, but usually you are more discerning.

You're playing a semantic game, David, and you're trying to get me to
take you seriously about this old gun-nutz chestnut. I really can't,
any more than I can take seriously the principal who suspended that
kid for the pop-tart.

Defining this bit of reality as "this old gun-nutz chestnut" seems like
an ad hominem attack. You have failed to demonstrate that guns are any
more than inanimate objects, dangerous only in the context of their use,
so you disparage those who disagree with you.

I write "I fear hammers in the sense that some people can be dangerous
with hammers" and you see "I fear hammers".

Because that's what you said, your qualifier notwithstanding.

The important part of the sentence is the qualifier.

Not odd that you didn't have a response to this, as doing so undermines
your doubtful argument.


A gun in my safe is inherently dangerous? To whom?

I'll grant that a gun locked forever in your safe is a safe gun. Once
it comes out, it is not.

Once it comes out of the safe, and in my hands, it continues to be only
potentially dangerous, depending on how I use it.


A gun in the hand of someone I don't know is potentially dangerous. Not
inherently.

If that same person does not have a gun in his hand, is he as
potentially dangerous?

I know that there are people who can kill with their bare hands. Should
I assume that someone w/o a gun is not dangerous?

Keep in mind that guns are used in 68% of murders in the US (in 2013).
So what is it that makes him more dangerous?

Nothing. Most use guns because they aren't trained to kill with their
hands. In cultures with less access to guns, people still are killed,
just not with guns.

I talked with a guy once who feared that a gun sitting on a table with
no one near it would spontaneously fire. He didn't mean could, he
expected it to.

That was some kind of nut.

Yes, but, in my experience, common among anti-gun folks.

I have to wonder why you encounter more nuts than I do.

I guess I just notice them more.

Too many Mensans. g

As I once pointed out to my sister, Mensa is a big tent with room for
gun controllers, creationists and rational people.



I was taught at an early age to not point a gun at something I did not
intend to shoot. I would object and tell him to move it if someone put
the gun on the table pointing at me. I admit a gun pointing at me makes
me uncomfortable, even if there is no one holding it. It seems a
violation of what I consider basic gun safety.

It is. I believe it's founded on the idea that there are many
potentially dangerous situations that can occur with guns, and that,
as a principle, we must avoid all of them that we can, no matter how
remote they are, while still retaining the ability to use the gun for
its purposes. A harmless situation can evolve into a dangerous one
with alarming speed and can't always be anticipated.

But your reaction (which is exactly like mine would be) has no
relationship to the actual circumstances of the moment. It's part of a
safety routine. It only makes sense if you think the gun will go off
spontaneously.

And yet, that's how you and I both react. In itself, it makes no
sense.


Would you object to the person who left the gun that way?

I'd know the person did not have basic gun safety embedded in his
behavior. If you do, you would never do such a thing.

I'd know that, too, and in the right circumstances, try to make it a
teaching moment.

Would you do that?

I have, although it was a .22 rifle.

What does the caliber have to do with it? Do you object less to being
shot with a .22?



And I had a hang-fire for about three or four seconds (or it seemed
that long) in a 20 ga. shotgun with a factory skeet load. Guns are
just such a mature technology that nothing ever goes wrong, goes
wrong, goes wrong...

That's why, when I pull the trigger and the gun doesn't fire, I don't
look down the barrel to see what's wrong.

The trick there, with my Flightmaster pump, was to avoid quickly
chambering a new round after the first one was a dud. Without the
training, I might have done so, just in time for the ejected shell to
go off in my face.

Is 20 seconds too much to wait? Is a minute too little? Only one way to
find out. Eventually, you have to open the breech.

David