I'm embarrased to say this, but I have had a gun pulled on me twice, both times for losing my temper with someone. It happened one time on the highway in my car and another time in a parking lot while on foot. I was only yelling at them both times, so there was no physical violence involved, but I look back on it now and realize it was my own fault for being so immature.
Anyway, I can definitely attest to the ability of a gun to rapidly change one's attitude. It changed mine! LOL! It's also ironic how guns can actually reduce violence by diffusing a situation beofre it ever reaches that level. The author said:
"you go from enduring a black eye or a bloody nose to suffering from a gunshot wound"
That might be true sometimes, but most of the time it would seem that brandishing a gun will take the situation from bloody nose to nothing happened at all.
I find that when I carry a gun I tend to avoid situations, mainly because while carrying I tend to have a heightened sense of situations to avoid. The anonymity of my car tends to nurture aggression more than carrying a sidearm. When I'm not driving my car, I am at those times either a pedestrian or a bicyclist. But that doesn't keeping the down the automotive urge to run over idiot pedestrians and bicyclists who desperately need to experience the exhilaration of natural selective encounters.
I remember a few years ago a story with something like the following headline:
Was the headline factually accurate? Yes. Was it honest?