Jim and Nicky with his Taurus .38 snub nose special, Colt 380-Auto, Pony Pocketlite and Sig Sauer P232 .380. (Photo: Kyle Cassidy)
Jim: When I was diagnosed with cancer I found myself and my family in need of protection. I was too old to fight, too sick to run, and since cancer took my vocal cords, I couldn't yell for help. I purchased my first ever firearm.
Freelance writer and photographer Kyle Cassidy traveled 15,000 miles taking photos of gun owners in America and asking them this simple question: "Why do you own a gun?" Some of their answers were surprising.
Two years later, he compiled his work in a book titled Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. Link - via One Large Prawn
The car has a completely different function than the gun. The car is not designed to kill, when used properly. The gun is designed to kill. That's is function. Your purpose for it may be protection, but its function as a device is to propel a bullet, most often into a living object, for the purpose of incapacitating or killing that living object.
With a car, your purpose may be to get to work, pick up groceries, drag race, or to get laid. But the car's function is transportation.
Well if you do, I can immagine that the large numbers are the reason. Well what about a product that has killed on average 28,000 a year in the US?
If you had the choice which one would you like to ban first?
If you said the object that has killed 41,000 a year, then congradulations. You have just banned the automobile (your car and all road vehicles)
If you said the object that killed less, that was the gun. Which by the way, is responsible for more suicides than murders.
Truth is death is inevitable, we fear it a little too much. In some cases we invest a larger ammount of fear to other types of death. For some reason genetal mutilation prior to being set on fire is feared more than just getting shot. You can see this fear everytime a new disease is reported as a possible pandemic. People fear bird flu more than they do the regular flu. Guess which one kills more people every year? The regular flu. It is only natural to fear death, what is beyond reason is our poor rationality when it comes to creating laws that try to prevent death. If we were consistant, everything that has a potential to kill us would be outlawed. Let's start with all cars before we move on to guns.
Actually, the opposite is the case. Easy access to guns means equivalent easier access to guns for criminals.
I should point out that right now amazon.com has it at a nice discount.
:-)
kyle
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www.armedamerica.org