Bang, Bang

Guns, for many people in the United States, are more than objects, or even weapons. They're a facet of identity. And while for many people who feel that guns are too prevalent in the United States that identity is one of machismo and aggression, for the people who hold it, it's about the ability to protect themselves, and the people and property that are important to them. If you pick up a random handgun or self-defense magazine from a store newsstand, it's easy to conclude that somewhere, there is a photographer who's living the good life from the royalties of photos of distressed-looking White women being vaguely menaced by sketchy guys in hoodies.

One of the things that tends to become apparent when you talk to people who have concerns about crime, is that "crime that they care about/frightens them" and "crime" are treated as synonymous. And that the difference between the reporting of or on crime and the actual incidence of crime is purely academic. For all that people can note that "if it bleeds, it leads" as a mantra of modern news media, it never seems to occur to many people that the stories that may their way to them fall into that category.

And people in general tend to treat guns as if they were some sort of death ray; pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger simply does them in, and this is true of anyone, whether they've spent enough time on a shooting range to actually know how to handle their weapon well or not.

And so they become seen as easy solutions to a ubiquitous problem, except by those people who have spent enough time around weapons and understand enough about the law (and how people interact with it) to know better. But they're a part of the discussion more rarely than might be hoped.