kelley, sugar, why are you so cruel to me? You're sweet like honey and i love you madly, but you break my heart by twisting and distorting my arguments.
I do not care about guns, their safety, legality, or revolutionary potential. My quarrel is not with guns, but with gun fetishism. For different people guns epitomize different things: freedom, virility & sexual prowess, cockiness, conspiracy, the mother of all social ills, to name a few. This is why any discussion regarding gunz in this cuntry is, in fact, a kulturkampf.
To further illustrate - I like cars with a manual transmission - partly beacuse they are cheaper and more fuel efficient, and partly because I am a European snob. However, if the gummint banned manual transmission on all vehicles - I would not loose any sleep over it. Why? Because manual transmission is just a mechanical gizmo, not an epiphany of either my inner self, or something that threatens it. Since I do not make my living by manufacturing, selling, or repairing manual transmissions, I would not want to expend my intellectual and emotional energies on something of rather marginal significance to my life. That would change, however, if the manual transmission was a crucial link to my inner self, or a vehicle for expressing my self-esteem.
That is precisely what gunz are in this cuntry - fetishes of what people desire or fear. The gun wars are really a debate about those desires and fears. That is Psychology 101. The only aspect of it that is mildly intersting for a sociologist is the process whereby this gun fetishism became a part of the Amerikun collective consciousness.
As to your arrest story - it is indeed regrettable and my heart you so recklessly broke is with you in case you may need it, but the cop behavior you describe is not the eveidence of the Supreme Evil conspiracy plans to emasculate us. As the garbage can theory of organizational behavior teaches us, recourse to the past records and routines is a normal response of any organization under the condition of uncertainty.
wojtek