"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 14:07:55 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
calmly ranted:

I said:
Question 1: If you were inside your house and a mob came up to get
you, would you want a standard magazine or a high-capacity magazine in
your handgun or rifle to defend yourself? Be honest.

Answer 1: Honesty says that no mob ever came up to get me in my house.
And
it never will. If that doesn't satisfy you, then you don't understand the
political problem.

Ah, the Indestructible American denial bug. Well, when the Shrub
succeeds in getting 1.3 billion Muslims united against us and they
take out the American infrastructure, bringing anarchy to your door,
you just may change your stance on that...a bit too late. I'd rather
play it safe and stock up on necessities now.

You know, Larry, there is a long continuum of risk-aversion, running from
the Boy Scouts and "Be Prepared" at one end, to paranoid psychopathology --
Howard Hughes collecting his urine in Mason jars and stacking them on a
shelf, just in case -- at the other. Your scenario sounds a lot closer to
Howard Hughes than to the Boy Scouts.

I'd rather spend my time doing things that are creative, or productive, or
otherwise satisfying (these messages are good examples of things to avoid in
that regard g), rather than collecting maggot recipes and training
cockroaches to bring in the newspaper, in anticipation of a nuclear
holocaust.

So, I'm not anticipating any mobs trying to break in my front door. OTOH,
people who love to wave those 20-round magazines around are a creepy lot;
taking one into the woods to hunt deer is likely evidence of some simmering
pathology; in fact, it's a pretty good identifier of nutballs, based on my
range experience.

I'll go with the odds and my instincts -- they've both served me pretty well
in this short life. No Muslim hoards are likely to make it necessary for me
to replace my six- and seven-round magazines with 20-round magazines.
Ignoring libertarian impulses in favor of normal human insight and the
values of stereotyping for a moment (if you don't stereotype, you don't live
long), anyone with a head screwed on tight and who has spent a lot of time
with guns and shooters knows that the people who like them are the risky
fringe, and that they're the ones you most worry about when you go hunting
or otherwise find yourself around them.

With that in mind, I think that knowing how to shoot and having access to a
gun isn't a bad idea at all, even though the chance I'll ever *need* it is
quite remote (I've lived 56 years without that "need," and I see nothing on
the horizon to suggest the trend is changing). Besides, shooting is fun, I'm
pretty harmless, and my guns have nothing to do with anyone else's crime
problem.

But the guy over the next hill may not be. And he's one hell of a lot more
likely to show up on a turkey shoot than the Mongol hoards are to break down
my door.

It's a question of whether you prefer to see some common sense when you're
around people with guns, or you'd rather get into a debate about philosophy.

Ed Huntress