(Please note, the above is satire. I’m actually in favor of handguns being highly restricted, nearly as much as automatic weapons, except for (until handgun restriction is fully implemented successfully) those classes that truly do need it to defend themselves, and even then, quite a bit of restriction.)

And, many states actually rely on hunting of deer to prevent deer overpopulation (which can hurt the deer far worse than a few being killed off by humans).

Hell, if you really want a challenge, take up archery, or slingshooting, or stone throwing, or bullwhipping, or any number of ranged hole-in-paper-making-capable sports that don’t utilize devices that can also very easily put holes in people. If you absolutely have to feel like a badass, you could even take up throwing knives, hatchets, woodaxes, darts, spears, machetes, et cetera. They’re still nowhere near as dangerous as firearms.

So I’m fine with saying ‘the gun went off’, but yes, let’s include the fact that gross negligence on the part of the gun owner allowed the “accident” to happen.

I do feel that this was the fault of the parents. No one should be calling for a ban on pink guns though.

Well, there was that guy who used a gun to change the channel on his TV.

It may be apocryphal, but I think that counts as “doing good”… it was on FOX News at the time.

That’s really all there is to it.  A friend of mine in high school was in the national guard and told me about how she had completely stopped thinking of her rifle as a killing machine and saw it instead as just another thing.

While I don’t have a firearm (I don’t like them, and they’re illegal here anyway) I have an electric chainsaw, which I consider similarly dangerous, as well as daughters aged 6 and 4. What keep the latter safe in the same household as the former are: there’s only one power outlet to which the chainsaw can be physically connected, and that’s on its own circuit whose circuit breaker I leave switched off, so when I want to use it, I have get a stepladder and head to the fusebox; the chainsaw is fixed by a combination lock to a wall bolt; the wall bolt is in a cupboard 7ft up on a wall in my garage; the cupboard is locked and the key kept out of reach in the fuse box; the cupboard is in a locked garage.

What does not keep my daughters safe is the chainsaw’s color: I could paint “Pixie Summoner” on both sides and it wouldn’t make any difference to their safety.

Arguing that leaving a child with a loaded Hello Kitty Uzi is more irresponsible than leaving them with a loaded dull gray MAC-10 is akin to saying Stalin would go down in your estimation if you discovered he was a poor tipper: a distinction there may be, but it’s very much a distinction without a difference.

So the other 36 were shot on purpose.

There is a reason hunting with an Ar-15 is illegal in most states, all but 10.

There is also a reason hunting with handguns is illegal in most states.  Not to mention the “handguns” people hunt with are very different then the handguns that most people think about when discussing handguns.  apples and oranges.

Why does the nutso group of gun owners consistently do more damage to gun rights then anyone anti-gun?  They give responsible gun owners a bad name.

They’d come away with a very strong impression of just what I think about firearms, and just what horrible, senseless things they are. I’m not sure I could find a way to not unnerve and depress them horribly. Because they’ve simply got to know what these damned things are, and what terrible things they can do.

At best it’s neutral, and at worst it’s a necessary evil.