Guns make me nervous, always have and always will. In particular I'm not a big fan of handguns because it just seems like it would be too easy to make a catastrophic error with one. That's why seeing people walking around with handguns makes me jumpier than a mouse in a room full of cats. It's not that I think they'll gun me down for looking at them cross-eyed, rather it's that I can think of 100 ways that someone could inadvertently pop off a round and I can just as easily imagine myself catching that round somewhere on my body. That explains why you won't catch me within ten miles of the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park on August 14 when some pro-gun people hold their Restore the Constitution Rally.
Obviously I'm not a gun guy, but I'm also not someone who gets real worked up about gun control. I am a guy that's been known to sit in rush hour traffic and marvel that so few accidents occur on a daily basis rather than how many. Seriously, given what we know about the human condition how is it possible that thousands of cars driven by people who watch American Idol on a regular basis can weave from lane to lane at 75 mph and only a tiny minority actually wreck? Take that thought process and apply it to guns and you'll know where I'm coming from.
Befuddled 
I could not have said that better myself.
and yet Jon, the irony is that cars DO kill more people than guns and are much more poorly regulated. I’m fairly independent on a lot of issues, and not idiotic Tea Party independent but truly I have non party opinions that leave me basically without a party I like. But I am a gun guy. So of course I’m not as nervous about them as you are
But I am well versed in the statistics and the statistics basically explain away most of the fear some people have about guns. If you talk to most gun owners you’ll find that we(not the NRA) would favor much heavier penalties for those who misuse their weapons. For instance, recently in Kansas City a woman shot her own child in a gas station by mistake. She had a gun in her purse and it went off. I don’t know if a pen got stuck in the trigger because she carried it wrong or if the kid pulled it out…
But almost every gun owner I know wants that lady put in jail for a fair amount of time. But because that’s not a politically smart move the prosecutor is going to let her go. Some of the sentimentality of it goes along with arguments like “hasn’t she grieved enough already?” or “everyone can have mistakes”
So we get stuck in this weird position where gun owners want gun violators to be treated more harshly but it doesn’t happen. So we have to appeal for our gun rights to be upheld while we can’t get the prosecutors to actually punish those who break the law with guns.
Finally, I’ll say this. No matter how you feel about guns, I plead with you to not make an issue of it with the Democrats. Lately the Republican party has been going absolutely nuts with racists and just flat out idiots. But if the Democrats start taking a hard line on guns all of the sudden all of the independents are going to run away and vote Republican just due to that one issue. And there are so many gun owners and they vote much more regularly than my Democratic friends. For my part, I continue to try to reel in insane Republicans that claim that everyone is out to get their guns or tax their ammo or whatever.
We have one new driver and one soon-to-be licensed driver in our house
and I honestly think about the idiot factor a lot with them. I dont
know much about gun ed programs, but I do know that the official
drivers ed program isnt extensive enough and it scares me to think
how many kids are out there driving a one ton death machine with just
a few hours of instruction. If the same is true with guns then thats
what scares me, not the guns themselves. Im truly not an anti-gun
guy, I just want sane regulation of the kind you described.