Personal safety should never be up in the air and if there are not enough police officers, who is going to protect you and your family? The fact is that no major city in America has enough police to protect even half of its citizens, not even a fourth. Wake up and be realistic. For most people with common and safety sense, that should settle the issue for the most part. And if you are in a Walmart when someone starts shooting at everybody would you rather have a gun to at least try and protect yourself or not? Self preservation and common sense. All the philosophical issues you raise won’t mean much if you cannot protect yourself.

Psycho-physiological effects have a great deal to do with reluctance to add gun laws. Self-preservation comes before American ideals. The United States is a political and social experiment where we are ideally encouraged to defer our individual disputes to elected and appointed officials, but we have real doubts about the effectiveness of the authorities as our one and only saviors.

We don’t trust them because political power is lethargic and responds after a lawless act has occurred. We know that we’re on our own to be victims or to defend ourselves with guns until the authorities arrive. We haven’t solved the problem of political lethargy. This is a dangerous slowness within which many Americans have been grossly maimed or have lost their lives. I believe that most gun owners aren’t unreasonable fanatics. The appetite for self-preservation is a strong, natural controller of human behavior. The will to live is as natural as sucking in your next breath rather than passing out from a lack of oxygen.

We don’t have claws or fangs. We compete for survival with other things in nature. The invention of the gun was inspired out of man’s desire to overcome his inferior physical position in nature. Nature’s law of the survival of the fittest also accounts for our hunter-gatherer instincts. Guns help us to maintain our freedom and to stay at the top of the natural food chain.

A gun is a sacred tool invented out of our imagination and longings to escape the dangers accompanying frail mortality. We longed for a superior weapon that allows us to have control over nature. The gun makes real the superhuman ideas of Western European mythologies relative to patriarchal protection that previously found expression through the telling of ancient stories about the powers of gods, such as Prometheus’ fire, Thor’s hammer, Zeus’ lightning bolt and Poseidon’s trident.

There is a core of truth about us in these myths. That truth is that we seek to be more godlike by using the tools of the gods in our day-to-day existence. We have uncovered this truth about ourselves by contemplating gun laws. A gun is a machine that can be said to be handed down from the gods to help mankind survive. A gun comprises elements of magic because it is made through using the ancient principles of alchemy later known as applied science. A gun is hypnotic much like a television set, because its effective usage and appreciation requires our complete attention. Firing a gun imparts a human sense of accomplishment. It is easy to misunderstand our psychological and physical dependence on a gun, but the relationships is real, and it is not unreasonable.

Consider visiting a gun shop to study the various forms of guns, and possibly fire one. Study its symmetry. Contemplate the speed and accuracy of its projected missiles. Feel its power as you squeeze the trigger. Smell its odor and the odor of the gases it emits. Think about the sophistication of its design, run your fingers across its components and feel how it is thoroughly orientated to the human anatomy.

Is it any wonder why recently suggested changes in gun laws in America were first upsetting, and then defeated? A gun is tied to man’s sense of being and self-preservation just as much as his need to quench his thirst or feed his hunger. Putting all economic considerations aside, the gun is representative of man’s desire to survive his hostile environment. It is a form of accessible security that he can hold in his hand, point like a magic wand and make other perceived things react.

Ideally, America can be “heaven on earth,” but realistically it isn’t. The current laws governing our freedom to legally buy and sell guns are sufficient. The majority of Americans are still alive, and that’s because we haven’t killed ourselves off with guns.

Protect yourself. Protect others. Many of the Jews never left Germany because they never thought something like a Holocaust would happen to them. Don’t get caught off guard like they did.