The Concealed-Carry Fantasy

[DirkGently]

5. It is a fantasy. One apparently immune to logic or reality.

The web of irrational thinking woven around the idea that carrying guns around makes people safer has no parallel in terms of outright delusion aside from religious fanaticism.

A small segment of the population is transfixed by the idea that weapons give them super powers to stop crime, protect others, and (this one is particularly screwy) intimidate the government so that it doesn't get out of hand.

None of that has ever been true. They stack fallacies on top of fallacies, to the point where now when someone goes on one of our increasingly common shooting rampages, they literally sneer at the victims because they think the government is staging massacres to make guns "look bad."

And it's nothing more than a marketing scheme to get the gullible to spend their money on a fantasy of personal empowerment with a likelihood of "paying off" on the level of a lottery ticket. Meanwhile crime still occurs, we're less safe than countries with more restrictive laws, and of course the government continues to do whatever it wants.

I guess it's good to see statistics puncturing one of the go-to talking points, that "concealed permit holders never commit crimes." Never quite understood how going to a class magically ensured no one ever misused a weapon.

Of course the cost of disproving just that one myth is measured in dead Americans, as usual.