A comment posted by reader Gyufygy:
Back when I was in the gun-control camp, putting the “genie back in the bottle” seemed like a great idea. A year or two ago, it finally hit me: you can’t put it back. The country was founded with firearms usage and ownership being common. It’s been that way for centuries now. What is the current estimate for number of guns in the US? 200 million? Putting aside all Constituional arguments (for a moment, pipe down), I realized . . .
. . . that there is no practical way to make them all go bye bye in a country this large. None. Too many, too big a country, too “ornery” a populace (:p), too much history, too much 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure (again, ignoring the 2nd Amendment protections for a moment), too many metal working machine capable of producing functional (if not accurate, reliable, or pretty) firearms. Too. Damn. Much.
So I could either wave magic wands around or learn to defend myself and my loved ones. The genie has always been out of the bottle, and there never was a bottle, anyway.
Also, they’re fun.