It's said that doing a job properly requires the right tool, such as, the aphorism about not bringing a knife to a gun fight. In this country, citizens are obsessed over a particular set of tools: firearms. They talk about how likely it is a gun will be used in stopping a crime, and about how people should be given a choice about it.
Guns are specialized tools. An actuary can figure it out the risk, but what are the odds that you're going to get mugged or burglarized as compared to the odds that you'd lock your keys in the car? If the latter happens, you've brought the wrong tool to the situation.
I thought of the phrase "wrong tool" when I heard about a tragedy that seems comical if it weren't so sad, where a father and son were at home showing their brand new AK-47 to friends. What do you think happened? The gun went off. That's to be expected. I mean read Dailykos' weekly Gunfail and you find out that people can't seem to determine when a gun is and isn't loaded, and/or can't seem to keep their hands off the trigger when it is. I swear, whoever created automatic pistols with the booby trap that kept a bullet in the chamber removing the clip was an evil genius. So many people get killed or wounded because they don't check the chamber, even those who know better.
What makes this AK-47 incident notable to me was apparently a fire started from the gunshot. It happens occasionally, but the house was apparently loaded with ammunition which caught fire and blew the place up. The father and his twelve-year old son were killed, the friends got out.
"The fire did not seem threatening at first," said one witness. Yes, most fires go through that small, cute phase, but they're never truly cute in a place full of ammunition. Then the son tried to help the father put it out, and that's how they both got killed.
It looks to me like the father spent thousands of dollars stuffing his home with guns and ammunition, but didn't spend $60 on a fire extinguisher. Or at least didn't spend it on one or two that were within handy reach of his ammunition caches. I have one of those for my kitchen, and I don't even own a gun. In a pinch, I can even fog a burglar with it, then smack him in the head. Notice when it was wrong tool just how useless that AK-47 became?
How can you take guns and explosives into your home for fun or protection and not have some sort of minimal fire control? Somebody who does that should never be allowed to own an AK-47.
I know that there are responsible gun owners out there, however, I believe they're the ones who don't boast of how responsible they are, and who definitely don't have blanket confidence in other peoples' responsibility or ability to learn it.
I think one of the paradoxical problems with human nature is the people who have the most confidence that they're responsible and safe tend to be the least responsible and safe people. We can see this mental blindness in other things. Such as multitasking, where nobody actually can do it, and the people who think they're superb at it are actually the worst. Or with drinking: the people who think they're best at driving drunk are most often the worst. Because they think they can drive competently while drunk, they also tend to do it, even to the point where they're in denial after they kill somebody.
Following those examples of "confidence blindness," I'm afraid I tend to believe the people most willing to laud responsible gun ownership are the ones least likely to be responsible. Moreover, they are completely oblivious to their carelessness. The people who are extra careful are the ones who are aware of how fragile the human mind is and how easily it can lapse. You wouldn't have so many people collecting guns if that were the attitude. Every gun in the house would be looked upon as another risk they have to watch, a source of stress, not as something they show off for fun.
I tend to be more skeptical about the people making responsibility arguments and not the argument itself. I know that isn't fair, but that's how I believe.
Nevertheless, I do find another flaw in responsibility arguments. Responsibility is presented as an absolute state of mind, and that overlooks the fact that in the real world, it's presence is a statistical phenomenon. If you're the most responsible person, it means you do the responsible thing 99.99% of the time (I choose that figure at random. I don't know the actual number.) You have to add up how many ways and opportunities are there to screw up with a gun?
It takes an actuary, of course, to figure that out, but actuaries already ruled against arming teachers, as insurance companies jacked rates or refused coverage for school districts that wanted to adopt that policy. Why? Because when a business has to bet money on it, the odds of somebody screwing up or turning malicious with a gun made available at a school are far better than thwarting a school shooter. Insurance companies didn't seem to think that more responsibility would matter.
I've come up with a great expression, and I like the turn of phrase, even if I don't think it's true: "Responsible gun owners don't own guns." I just realize, though, I've made an abstinence argument: the safest sex is no sex. Both are contradictions, and they don't stay within the parameters of the question posed.
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