Nice!! I want one now!

I guess there's a benefit in teaching someone to use a tool that is capable of killing you. The respect and discipline involved is something of a life lesson, and can be extended to any number of potentially deadly things that we interact with more or less often.

When I was about 12, my dad and I went to a gun range in Florida for the first time, and he put his 1911 .45 in my hands, and showed me how to hold it, how to check if it was loaded, how to load it, and how to shoot it. He showed me how to respect the thing for the destructive life-taker that it is.

"Don't point a gun at anything you don't want to destroy" he said over and over again. I was terrified. I still enjoy shooting guns, even though I don't own any, and don't think I'll ever want one, but I can see the allure.

When you infuse an object with that level of emotional mass... it's like you can feel it in the room with you. The thing becomes more than a tool, it's a little gravity well of destructive power.

That's how I see them anyway. The people who are nonchalant about them scare me though. Stupid kids pointing guns at themselves in facebook cover photos. These people are the reason we can't have nice things.

Benefits:
1. If a government did decide to crush it's citizens by way of direct physical means, then the citizens would have a marginally increased chance of defending themselves against small task forces.

2. If someone without invitation enters your home lacking any degree of friendly intentions, then having a small remote control sized devise to 'turn them off' could be beneficial to yourself and your loved ones, provided you knew how to use it safely and could analyze a situations quickly and calmly enough while rationally determining when to and when not to act with said device.

As a general statement about the item and not the skill or mentality of using the item, I think guns are a very effective, reliable, strategically advantageous and intelligently engineered tool for destroying a target from range while increasing your level of safety as best one can.

.. and it is for this core reason above while combined with others that I think civilians should not have them for a reason as illegitimately justified as 'I want one'.
Combine the high degree of effectiveness of the tool, while noting what the single effectiveness is (i.e. quick ranged destruction), with mental instabilities and you have a potentially negative and hard to control situation. Arming more people to act as defenders only further pushes the negative potential to higher levels as they are also subject to fluctuations of rational thought.

For those who want to 'shoot down' this above statement as a curable and treatable problem of mental health, you are inherently and naturally wrong. Emotions are not rational thought, they are effective survival mechanisms precisely because they can easily blind us to some logical thought processes that could otherwise get in the way of us doing what seemingly needs to be done, depending on which emotion is in question and any circumstantial details of the specific situation.
Emotions evolved over a long period of time and subsequently are not geared beneficially for all the challenges we face in this modern world, the result is byproduct effects.

In regards to my 1st stated benefit, if someone genuinely thinks that because they have a tool that can spit out 600 rounds of lead a minute with an effective accuracy range of 800 meters, that this is going to give them a realistically decent chance of going head to head and holding their own against an army of people who are just like themselves (i.e. standard human attributes) with the difference of this activity being the life they have dedicated themselves to professionally for years.. then that pro-gun human is grossly delusional.
The previous point doesn't even begin to touch on the sheer difference of resources in terms of quantity let alone quality, in that if you actually managed to hold your own for long enough, you would get bombed into oblivion without ever having a clue it was going to happen until at best a second or 2 before it occurred.

Re my 2nd stated benefit, if the intruder has already gained access to your house before you have your tool in hand and aimed at them, then there is as reasonable a chance they could get to you before you can defend yourself, at which point that tool could then potentially be used against you or you loved ones.

PS: crap, that was meant to be a short post.

I WANT ONE!!!! I hope he doesn't eat my kittehs

OMG so cute -- I want one!

*kids want one of these under the tree tomorrow!

I haven't handled a pistol since 1983 in boot camp. All I need to do in Oregon to get a CCW is watch a video online, take an online test, pay to download the certificate, and take the certificate to the Sheriff's office for my permit. I wouldn't want me carrying a gun in public, but I could if I wanted to, with virtually no experience or training. Now, guns are not my thing. I don't want one. I'm relatively sane, but if I wasn't, if the world was cruel and oppressive and needed a dark knight, getting a CCW would be just as easy.

This video shows simply and clearly that things very often don't go as you plan when you find yourself in a very stressful and scary situation, and that the training required to perform spontaneously and correctly in such situations must be ongoing, something the vast, vast majority of CCW's would be unable or unwilling to do. Would they have performed better had the "drill" happened when they were told it would happen? Maybe, but that isn't how things unfold in RL now, is it? Sometimes it's an elementary school classroom full of six and seven year-olds, or with smoke bombs in a movie theater, or outside the food court at a mall, or even, like this video, in a lecture hall at a school.

So drop the paranoid, ulterior-motive bullshit. "Dubious"? You sound like a child.

i want one

Thanks!

In reply to this comment by notarobot:
This is MUCH more portable than the regular piano I've been keeping in my back pocket during all my travels over the last three years. I want one.

*Promote.

This is MUCH more portable than the regular piano I've been keeping in my back pocket during all my travels over the last three years. I want one.

*Promote.

Having now used an iPad mini, I can honestly say...

I WANT ONE MORE THAN EVER.

I want one.

In a perfect world...
>> ^grinter:

want one. too lazy to make one.
vi will make me one?

excellent dog walker. I want one!

want one. too lazy to make one.
vi will make me one?