TTAG commentator Boba Fett wrote this under our post Personal Defense…It’s an Act of Love:
I have a Progressive-with-a-capital-P friend. She’s a statist to the bone, is absolutely terrified of guns (to the point where she can’t even watch movies with guns in them), and truly believes government can and will solve all of our problems.
Like you did, I decided to humor her a few years ago and get into the gun debate. We were in her apartment in Brooklyn and I asked her, “What if some thug busts down your door right now and tries to kill you? What are you going to do?”
Her response (I kid you not):
“I don’t know…die?”
That’s it. Thing is, she doesn’t want to die, but she has to just shrug her shoulders and act like she doesn’t care because she knows she has absolutely no valid response to that question. Anti-gunners like her have to first swallow two crazy pills to justify their stance:
1) It will never happen to me (unfortunately, that’s what everyone says the day before it happens to them).
2) Not only will I have the opportunity to call the police, explain the situation, and give them my address, but they will also show up so quickly that the assailant will not have a chance to do me any harm.
And they bet their lives on these premises.
I’ve known her since middle school, long before either of us formed any political beliefs at all. She’s never had any kind of traumatic, real-life event involving a gun. She just hates them for reasons unknown. Now that she’s an adult, she readily gobbles up any “statistics” and arguments that are even remotely anti-gun, without question, simply because they validate the true core of her anti-gun stance: her feelings.
In that same conversation, I verbally cornered her and got her to admit what I knew all along about anti-gunners: she actually doesn’t care about how many people in this country get shot, she wants all guns banned because SHE is terrified that SHE might get shot, because SHE has been staring, saucer-eyed, at the mainstream media for the majority of her life. She “feels” that anyone who leaves their house at anytime, anywhere, stands an excellent chance of getting shot to death. That’s all.
Anti-gunners love to throw out tallies of the dead and pretend they give a fuck about people who live thousands of miles away whom they’ve never met. But the human brain isn’t wired that way.
At the end of the day, we’re all self-serving, but the way “news” is reported has guilted a huge swathe of the country into believing they’re supposed to care, and if they don’t, they’re just the worst kind of callous asshole. It’s just control, masquerading as safety. And people buy it.