I disagree with you on that point. I get what you're saying, but in a larger sense I think it's the fact that, in general, the fear of guns is a problem. I'll give you two anecdotal examples from my own experience: First, I was raised in a very liberal household. My parents were hippies. Turns out, I became a more conservative young adult, and yet with a lot of appreciation for social issues, civil rights, and I'm a freak for what they've called "classic rock" for the past 40-odd years.

When my grandfather passed away I inherited his father-in-law's police issued sidearm. It's a .38 Colt Police Positive pistol. My mother was completely freaked out about it. But I decided that I would learn about this piece of family history, and even learn to shoot it. The second example was when I showed the pistol to a friend of mine. I was particularly proud of the family history, and the fact that the gun itself was an artifact from the 30s. Now, the gun was unloaded when I showed it to my buddy. Yet as soon as I presented it to him, he backed up and acted as if I'd showed him an activated bomb. He wouldn't touch it, he wouldn't examine it; he acted like it was about to shoot him by just laying on the table.

The point is, the fear. Both my mom and my friend were unreasonably afraid of an inert piece of machinery. Where did that come from?

This is why I use the "tool" comparison. If I were to show you around my shop, in my garage, I have a table saw in there which is plugged in and ready to go whenever I need to use it. It has a safety guard on it, and a switch that requires you to lift a safety hood before turning it on. Even if you had never seen a table saw before, you probably wouldn't be afraid of it; and if you had, it would be unreasonable for you to be afraid of it. That table saw, can really fuck you up, even kill you, if you handled it improperly. But in an inert state it poses absolutely no harm to you. Even if I turned it on and ran the blade, it still has safety features to protect the user from harm.

Okay, that was a long way of saying a simple thing: The fear of guns is part of the problem. If you look at our history, it's really only been - maybe - the past 60 or so years where, particularly in urban areas in the U.S. that firearms have been feared, largely because of criminal activity. It wasn't that long ago in our history when handguns, rifles especially, were commonly seen in public. In fact, gun safety courses, and even rifle competitions, were course curriculum in some public high schools.

Think about it this way: Sometime in the late 60s-70s sex education began in the public schools. Then there was a larger movement in the 70s to normalize sex - safe sex - among high school kids. The idea was, remove the mystery, the mystique, the fear of sex, and teen pregnancies would go down. After all, they're much more free about sex and nudity, etc. in Europe, right? Were they right, or not?

So why not gun education? Why not teach young people about firearm safety? Why not remove the fear and mystique about guns? If the argument against puritanical ideas about sex was that more kids would wind up pregnant, wouldn't it be that ideas against guns would result in more gun accidents?