It's always about control
Disclaimer: I admit this post is a bit pedantic and broad -- so shoot me.
Your article contrasting the workings of the liberator with a real gun were informative since I am ignorant about firearms. Once one leaves the domain of the mechanics however the facts recede "like a distant ship smoke on the horizon". The struggle for control doesn't rely on facts and that is what gun debates and all societal debates are about.
Anti-authoritarian temperaments are as necessary as authoritarian ones. Societies are not static systems.
There is not a nation in the world that doesn't owe its existence to violence. We are a violent species. Periods of peace are the product of a surplus of resources for a group and the use of those resources to create a force to insure that those resources keep coming. That is what creates civilization. Civilization requires excess resources so that there can be culture. All civilizations have funded themselves by military expansion and domestic suppression of those opposed to such expansion and the populations of those civilizations enjoy the fruits of that conquest which keeps them happy.
When the powers that be however turn on their own citizens to maintain the status quo of their power, things get dicey. Anti-authoritarian temperaments do not trust power. They know that they as individuals are irrelevant to the power structure and feeling threatened seek some minimal form of defense to alleviate their anxiety.
One might wish for a world holding hands and singing Kumbaya but that is not who we are and never have been.
Of course a society can't exist either without a large portion of the population being compliant and agreeable to their leaders. Majority rule in effect has always been the case. We forget that the notion of "rights" are not there to protect the majority. They are there to protect the minority and they were instituted by a minority that knew how hard it was to overthrow the majority. Of course the "new boss" becomes the "same as the old boss". That is what power does. And so the cycle begins again.
I am one of the majority but I am not under the illusion that the world I live in is somehow sacrosanct and inevitable. It is the product of a long series of accidents and violent encounters and no one knows what the future will reveal but one thing is for sure, the battle for control and resistance to control never end.
I ask myself, if the population of Germany during Hitler's or Mussolini's rise to power had been armed to the teeth, would they have been able to enforce the control over their societies that they did? Would Assad in Syria been able to enforce his rule ? We laud the revolutionaries who fight dictators but it's just talk unless we provide them with the means to fight. How are the rebels in Syria getting weapons?
Of course the argument by anti-gun people is we don't live in that world. Which may be true now but what population living in relative comfort hasn't believed that. Democracy is not about voting, it's about distributed power. That is it's driving force. Voting is a mechanism. and we know from the news that there are places in the world where people vote but power remains centralized.
I don't own a gun but I do understand the mentality of people who desire to have them for a variety of reasons. And yes, there will be bad people with guns just like there are bad drivers in cars. Everything has a cost. More often than not, we don't know what the cost is until we are presented with the bill.
And if our leaders are so smart, how come we continually have to find new leaders to get us out of problems the old leaders put us in. They are just people too with their own view of the world, biases and emotional and psychological scars that effect them. And we see what happens when they have power.
We are still very primitive - we still operate under "them and us" divisions usually without any knowledge about the them. The simplistic models of the world in our heads are just that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
