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And thats part of it. If you are going to allow one, you allow all, and with that you will now have thought police discerning the intent of each person boarding an aircraft. Would you fly with someone who is half cocked? I can see it now: "114 people have shootout aboard Flight 327 to Newark. Pictures at 11".

This psychological phenomenon is known as "projection." From Dr. Sarah Thompson's article, Raging Against Self-Defense,

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.²

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.

Projection is a defense mechanism. Defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological mechanisms that protect us from feelings that we cannot consciously accept.⁵ They operate without our awareness, so that we don't have to deal consciously with "forbidden" feelings and impulses. Thus, if you asked my e-mail correspondent if he really wanted to murder his neighbors, he would vehemently deny it, and insist that other people want to kill him.

Projection is a particularly insidious defense mechanism, because it not only prevents a person from dealing with his own feelings, it also creates a world where he perceives everyone else as directing his own hostile feelings back at him.⁶

I can see it now: "114 people have shootout aboard Flight 327 to Newark. Pictures at 11".

Are those like the shootouts that occured over parking spaces when CCW laws passed in 34 states? The liberals promised those, but they never happened.

Or the gun battles involving shoppers in the grocery store check out lines? The liberals promised that as well.

Or is it going to be like the "Wild, Wild West" (which is exagerrated to start with), with gun duels? The liberals promised that would happen as well.