Massad Ayoob

In the end, the focus on safety should be credited to the entire firearms-owning community, the __un culture_ if you will.

Firearms, if you think about it, are power tools. They drill holes in things and chew things up. That__ their purpose. The purpose of the user is, quite simply, to puncture and destroy the right things and not the wrong things.

Those of us who have seen violent death up close, who have seen what high-powered bullets can do to living human tissue, have a horror of inflicting that nightmarish, never forgotten damage on a fellow human being. Perhaps the only more terrifying prospect is that such a fate should befall us or our loved ones. This is why we, a representative cross-section of America's population, keep deadly weapons for personal defense.

A basic principle of American justice holds that a bad man has the same rights as a good man.