ERROR: Account closed.
James L Westrich II
westrich at miser.umass.edu
Wed Jun 2 05:36:20 PDT 1999
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>Jordan Hayes wrote:
><BLOCKQUOTE><<But enough about me; how about you go find the answer
>to your question (how often does a handy pistol turn road rage into a shooting?)
>and come back to us with your answer.>></BLOCKQUOTE>
>Actually, Jordan, that's your question, not mine. My questions were
>along the lines of <<Does road rage never seize them when their handy-dandy
>pistolas happen to be in the glove compartment?>> Not quite the same
>thing.
><P>I'm not claiming that guns <<activate>> aberrant criminal behavior.
>I am saying that guns facilitate the expression of aberrant impulses with
>gestures that will terminate any conflict just as certainly as they will
>make the person holding the gun an ex post facto criminal. This isn't
>just salon theorizing. In my own experience, two friends, both women,
>died after being shot by their partners. I believe that both women
>would probably be alive now, had their partners not had immediate access
>to a firearm. (Yes, I know I said "probably.")
><BLOCKQUOTE><<What's I'm not interested in is pre-judging gun owners
>as criminals.
><P>And that's exactly what you're doing when you say you're "afraid of
>guns" and it's exactly why I label that "irrational" ...>></BLOCKQUOTE>
>Wait a minute. I didn't categorize gun-owners as criminals, did I?
>What I meant to say is that ownership of a gun facilitates the expression
>of irrational impulses in ways that most of us would categorize as criminal.
>I'll concede at once that such dæmonic urges never enter the minds
>of the vast majority of gun-owners, but it's hard to see how such bland
>optimism might console the survivors of the two women whose deaths I mentioned
>earlier. Nothing irrational about that, in my opinion--or about fearing
>guns as the facilitators of such catastrophes.</HTML>
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