> It seems to me, they think those guns posses some quality that make them - and not persons using them - evil. This proposition is entirely uncontroversial am

> It seems to me, they think those guns posses some quality that make them - and not persons using them - evil. This proposition is entirely uncontroversial among a quite large segment of the polity. I'm afraid I must confess to a certain poverty of imagination in that I have never understood, and never hope to understand, why this is. I do, though, from my experience with people who consider the proposition tautological, recognize a strong correlation between holding that opinion and not having any personal experience with firearms of any sort. This contrasts with my own experience in that, having grown up rural, I have known since earliest childhood that firearms are useful tools, no more dangerous if handled according to elementary safety rules than any other power tool, and further that shooting is a skill whose acquisition and maintenance can be quite enjoyable for its own sake -- in short, firearms have never had any mystique for me, and I have the strong impression that that's the distinction between those who can reason about firearms as they can about any other tool, and those who consider firearms to inhabit some magical special category of their own, which is not meaningfully comparable to any other.