They’re also loud, severe, and scary. Perhaps dressing them up allows hesitant people to discover they are just tools.
Anyway, it’s not really a big part of the industry or the community. It’s good red meat though.
CraigM
3828
Is there a meaningful difference between the pink gun and this:
or this:
I mean, I get your point, and do agree in part that the pink gun is something I find disturbing, but the other guns are just as decorative (perhaps more so) just appealing to a different sensibility.
For me the only rational argument I can conjure against the pink gun is that it makes it look like a toy. There is some difference between looking like a toy, and making it look decorative. Admittedly the distinction is somewhat picking nits. But asserting that guns are purely functional tools, and should only look as such, is an infeasible position, unfortunately.
KWhit
3829
I thought the reason that toy guns were brightly colored is so that people would know they were toys and not freak the fuck out every time a kid picked up a toy gun to play cops and robbers. It was for safety’s sake for the kids playing with them.
Now if real guns can look just like toys, how are people supposed to tell the two apart?
It’s okay. The police will shoot you no matter what you’re holding in your hand.
I think the toddler shooting thing is related to the pit bull mauls kid thing. That is, certain types of possessions make people feel badass for owning them. There are many types of dogs you may own, yet certain people have to have intimidating dogs. A pit bull guy is not going to be happy with a beagle, you can’t project the same image walking down the street with a beagle that you can with a pit bull. Guns are another side of this phenomenon. Some, not all but some, gun owners own guns just so they can say they own guns. It’s an image thing. And as with pit bulls, sometimes these kinds of owners don’t even know the basic safety precautions, much less follow them.
That’s why gun control people who are in favor of not banning guns, but increasing enforcement of current laws or introducing new laws, are doomed to fail. Short of taking all guns away, you can’t stop this kind of thing from happening. Personally I believe it’s a practical impossibility to take all guns away from people here in the US without causing more mayhem than you’re trying to prevent. Maybe some day in a distant future where gun ownership becomes about as culturally acceptable as smoking, then guns will disappear. But even then it’ll be because people don’t want them, not because they were taken away.
I feel like we are so close to a point here.
rowe33
3834
This is why it’s ridiculous - a kid is going to see that and want to play with it. BOOM, dead kid, dead adult, dead somebody.
As a parent of two kids, they seem to want to play with anything in reach. The difference is negligible. That’s why they ought to be locked up when children are around, regardless of what the gun looks like.
CraigM
3836
And here is what happens when instead of guns, a would be killer has knives:
Not a terribly far distance from here actually.
Why the fuck wasn’t the 75 year old carrying a gun? He could have saved his hand.
Only halfway apropos for the thread, but… er, I’m just going to admit (with a fair amount of shame) that the situation darkly amuses me. Five people shot at ZombiCon.
One person died and the other four are expected to recover quickly. This is an event that attract 20,000 annually down in Florida and there was both police and private security that reacted almost instantaneously.
It’s darkly humorous in that (a) the video of huge crowds fleeing from the gunfire are better-directed than most of the stuff in Fear the Walking Dead, and (b) it must have been a REALLY weird experience for the EMTs who arrived to try and tell the people with real wounds from the people with realistic makeup.
Re: the ZombiCon shooting. I eagerly await pundits placing the blame here on Hollywood, games and/or furries.
Hey, don’t forget video games!!
Oddly enough, an acquaintance from high school was there and left early. His job is a camera for the local news channel so he was covering it the next day.
Lots of stupid gun tricks over the weekend.
Some doofus used live ammunition in an OK Corral reenactment with predictable results.
Another kid shoots his brother with their dad’s gun. All sorts of stupid here - the father buys a gun because he’s an ex-gang member who fears for his life. OK. His super-devious plan for home defense was to wrap the gun in a pair of pajama-pants and put it on top of the refrigerator. OK? He then points the gun out to his 6-year-old son and says “this is for adults only, don’t touch!” Um… Then, it’s 9 at night and the husband is off at work while the wife apparently figured it was just fine to leave her 3-year-old in the care of her 6-year-old while she went off to the grocery story. The kids then decide to play “cops and robbers” and the rest of the story is what you’d expect. Sad. In this case, the father is being charged with child endangerment but not (yet) the mother.
I had to click the story to check if it was a fatal shooting. Wish I hadn’t. What a tragic waste of life. Poor kid never stood a chance.
What the…?
Why is Dean Koontz writing articles for the Washington post?
That story would be laughable if not for the dead child.
At least he’s more than a statistic now, which is surprising given that it happened in Chicago.
