[theBuckwheat]

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Since Ms. Akerman's commentary, this paper has run half a dozen letters (and received perhaps a dozen more) from professors, psychologists, health care workers and gun control advocates all calling for a gun ban, or at least wondering aloud why ordinary people should be permitted to own such destructive objects.
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This begs the same "logic" for rapists, as I presume that Ms. Akerman herself has the equipment to commit that sexual offense against a perfectly innocent person, maybe even a harmless child.

Putting that aside, I observed during my own state's debate over allowing civilians to be licensed to carry concealed weapons, that liberals often project their own private, personal, dark fears about how they would behave if they carried a firearm.

Indeed, in some conversations and published opinion pieces, they give strong hints they fear their own inability to be able to control themselves. So they project this fear onto everyone else.

This is the only mindset that explains how emotional they can be in this debate: "We must not allow anyone to carry a weapon because if I carried, I fear I might abuse it."

[EdReform]

Putting that aside, I observed during my own state's debate over allowing civilians to be licensed to carry concealed weapons, that liberals often project their own private, personal, dark fears about how they would behave if they carried a firearm.

Raging Against Self Defense: A Psychiatrist Examines The Anti-Gun Mentality by Sarah Thompson, M.D.

"... About a year ago I received an e-mail from a member of a local Jewish organization. The author, who chose to remain anonymous, insisted that people have no right to carry firearms because he didn't want to be murdered if one of his neighbors had a "bad day". (I don't know that this person is a "he", but I'm assuming so for the sake of simplicity.) I responded by asking him why he thought his neighbors wanted to murder him, and, of course, got no response. The truth is that he's statistically more likely to be murdered by a neighbor who doesn't legally carry a firearm¹ and more likely to be shot accidentally by a law enforcement officer.¹

How does my correspondent "know" that his neighbors would murder him if they had guns? He doesn't. What he was really saying was that if he had a gun, he might murder his neighbors if he had a bad day, or if they took his parking space, or played their stereos too loud. This is an example of what mental health professionals call projection – unconsciously projecting one's own unacceptable feelings onto other people, so that one doesn't have to own them.³ In some cases, the intolerable feelings are projected not onto a person, but onto an inanimate object, such as a gun,⁴ so that the projector believes the gun itself will murder him..."