Feeling: anti-NRA
Listening to: Dashboard Confessional, "Jamie"
Reading/Watching: MLK, Letter from Birmingham Jail

Dom tried to tell me that owning a gun would make me safer if someone tried to mug me.

He didn't seem to understand that I consider the other risks of owning a firearm to be much greater than any chance that if someone attacked me, I would have the luck to have the gun with me, or the presence of mind to reach for it instead of pee my pants.

I know self-defense. I can kick in a kneecap, break a nose, I know the thing about keys between your knuckles and I know to check under and inside my car before getting into it. In seventh grade, they gave us a six-week course, and I even learned how to gouge an attacker's eye out (by the way, ew).

If someone came after me, owning a gun would be a greater liability than it's worth. I have no confidence that the person wouldn't take the thing from me and use it against me. Not to mention the dangers of owning one the rest of the time.

He tried to argue about how, with classes on gun safety, all of that would be taken care of.

Bull. A class on fire safety is not going to make me start igniting my sofa just for kicks. I've learned that chance is weird, and there's no predicting where or when something is going to happen. My best friend has no feet, but no matter how many years of defensive driving she took, she could not have kept two coke heads from running her off the road into a ditch in a burning car.

If something is going to happen, owning a gun will solve nothing. A rapist, a murderer, a mugger, whatever could come after me any time. Having a murderer in my pocket won't change that. And there's as much chance that I'd shoot myself in the foot as there is that I'd effectively defend myself. I'd rather not take the chance and give a toddler the opportunity to kill his best friend while playing cowboys and indians. I decided long ago that a semi-automatic weapon would never enter my house.

Just a little rant, with love from me to you. No offense, Dom, but we've covered how different our views are. I still love ya, and I'd argue politics with you any day of the week.

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