Bacon ops, I may have read all the wrong things, but everything I read from CCP holders, self defense enthusiasts and military-trained people says the same thing: don't pull your gun out unless you intend to fire it, and don't shoot someone unless you intend to kill them.

Guns can be used to scare and maim but their purpose is as a deadly weapon. And if you kill someone to save your own life, you've still killed someone. The function of a gun when it's used in self defense is to a stop -- nay, eliminate -- a threat by killing it. You can't skirt around that by saying they're intended for "protection" and killing is just an unfortunate side-effect.

Quote Originally Posted by Syme View Post
But "gun owning" and "owning a weapon used specifically for killing" aren't the same thing. You can't discount hunting, for instance, just because we haven't been talking much about it in this thread. A lot of people who own guns do own them for the purpose of hunting rather than killing people, no matter how little we've discussed hunting thus far. The same is true of sport shooting, historical collecting, and so on. I feel like it's disingenuous to say that gun ownership as a whole is horrific because one use for guns is horrific it happens to be the use we've talked about the most in this thread.
Well, gun ownership in the context of owning guns to kill people. I don't mean to discount hunting, I just mean that we haven't been discussing gun ownership of this kind, so it doesn't enter into this discussion. Owners of guns for hunting have essentially nothing to do with anything I've talked about, so I really have no problem with the concept whatsoever.

I don't mean to say hunting and sport shooting has no place in the gun ownership debate, I mean to say it's irrelevant in this debate because it's just not the type of gun ownership anyone's talking about.