I came across this piece about a neurotic woman who buys a gun. (h/t: Tam) Just read these choice excerpts:

Walking into the kitchen to refresh our drinks, I noticed my purse with the 9mm Glock still inside it. I’d forgotten to lock it up! Panic set in as I realized my teen son was playing videogames just 10 feet away. What if he’d decided to get the socks I’d bought him from my purse while I was out on the deck? Thoughts raced through my mind and I pondered how I’d just straddled the fine line between being a responsible gun owner and an irresponsible idiot whose 15-year-old just accidentally shot himself or someone else with my gun.
…
Now all I think about are the sounds I hear at night. I lie awake thinking: “Is someone breaking in? How fast can I get to the gun? Will they hear me? How much time do I have before they get to my bedroom? What if they go to my son’s room first? Will I shoot them in the face or heart or stomach?” And then I think: “How in the world would I live with myself knowing I took a life?”

Sometimes the thoughts intensify and I can’t sleep at all. Mostly, the gun in my house causes me an anxiousness and fear that’s draining. And it leads to some questions that have no easy answers.
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Another question: How accessible should the gun be when I’m home? A few nights ago, my son came home late, forgot his key, and knocked on the door. My first thought was, “Should I go get the gun?” I didn’t know who was on the other side of the door, and I was scared to find out as adrenaline surged through my body. I’m glad I didn’t get the gun because when I opened the door, I would have been a nervous, untrained mom pointing a gun at my son. The wrong split-second decision on my side would have been deadly.
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Since having the gun I’ve had two repairmen, a carpet cleaner, and a salesmen in my home. If the gun’s for self-protection, it’s not going to do any good in the safe, but it’s not really practical to have the gun pointing at them as they work. How else would I eliminate the element of surprise if I were attacked? Suspiciousness and fear of people is new to me, and I don’t like it.
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When I got to the second floor I became nervous, and the Oprah episode where a man attacks a woman alone in a situation just like this played in my head. I thought about the 9mm in my purse as I clumsily continued down the stairs in my skirt and heels. He followed me. I looked back at him so he knew I knew he was there (like Oprah’s expert suggested.) I thought: “Should I pull the gun out? Should I point it at him?” I realized the gun wouldn’t do me any good because he was behind me. My heart racing, we finally got to the lobby door where the man simply passed by me. I’d grown paranoid. He wasn’t the bad guy I perceived him to be, and the gun did not make me safe.
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An untrained permit holder like me shouldn’t be allowed to carry a concealed gun in states that at least require training and safety classes. <b>I was actually relieved to have a break from the gun and the constant thought, attention, and worry it required of me.

This is absolutely insane. Her neurotic paranoia is astonishing to behold. She repeatedly blames it on the gun (in bold), ie. she believes a chunk of inert metal has power to control her emotional state, but its obvious to anyone with two working brain cells that her mental problems (assuming they aren’t just made up for the story) go a lot deeper than that.

What kind of extreme emotional instabilities does someone have to have to even briefly consider pointing their gun at a professional repairman they invited into their home on the almost non-existent chance he might start violence. This kind of paranoid insanity boggles the mind.

I thought the gun would make me feel more powerful, more confident, and less fearful. I was wrong. All I felt was fear. Physically taking the gun out of the safe and putting it in a holster on my hip literally reminded me that I was going out into a big bad scary unsafe world. There were days when I put the gun back in the safe and stayed home because it simply took too much energy to be scared. It was easier to be at home without the worry and responsibility of being “the good guy with the gun.” My awareness of looming tragedy was abundant. If I had to pull the trigger, my life, the person I shot, both of our families, and all who witnessed it would be changed forever.

This women lives in fear, but it has nothing to do with the gun. The gun only focused her fear on a single issue. Her fear is a base part of her mental make-up, it defines her, but she normally manages to disperse her fear into a generalized low-level paranoia by avoiding situations where she would have any ability to respond to it. The gun gave her the ability to be responsible and to respond, focusing her general pervavise fears onto a single object.

Which brings me to my point: maybe the anti-gun nuts are right, in a way.

Maybe the reason anti-freedom advocates hate firearms and hate freedom is because they are neurotic, paranoid, and incompetent and they know it. The freedom-haters know they would be grossly irresponsible if they owned a gun due to their mental insufficiencies.

Maybe many of the freedom-haters hate freedom because they know they would make horrible choices if they were free. They then project their own inabilities on the rest of the world and assume everybody is as thoroughly inadequate as them.

If I was as crazy as this woman, there is no way I would let myself near a gun. If I thought everybody else was as mind-meltingly unbalanced as her I would seriously reconsider my position on gun freedoms. Thank goodness most of us are more mentally stable than this.

I hypothesize that anti-freedom advocates are simply mentally unbalanced people who project their instabilities on others. In that kind of bizarro world of insane people, gun control would only make rational sense.

It seems like another case of leftists fearing themselves more than anything.

I think the last paragraph is the most telling part of the piece:

I felt a huge sense of relief the day I got rid of the gun. I no longer had to worry that my teenagers or their friends would use my gun when I wasn’t home. I didn’t have to worry that I would be in a situation where I would make a choice about taking another life. I didn’t have to worry that my gun would be stolen out of my car and then used to murder someone. And I didn’t have to worry that one day I would get a diagnosis or have a personal crisis and have a gun on hand to turn on myself.

This woman hates choice, she fears choice, she fears consequences.

This woman is a child afraid of the world who wants a father-figure (in this case the government) to make the big scary world and its cruel choices to go away. She is the very definition of a natural slave.

Read that again and think on it: “I didn’t have to worry that I would be in a situation where I would make a choice about taking another life.”

This women would rather suffer robbery, rape, or death than be forced to make a choice and live with the consequences of that choice. She would rather have death than responsibility.

Maybe I was wrong earlier on in this post. Maybe, the primary drive behind gun-hating is not a gun-hater’s self-awareness of incompetence, but rather fear of responsibility.

Maybe the freedom-haters fear responsibility so much, they would rather live and die as cowering slaves than have to make choices themselves.

Maybe natural slaves are just born natural slaves.

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Other thoughts tangential to the main point:

In a way, her post supports expanded gun freedoms. If someone as thoroughly neurotic as her can own a gun for a month with no one getting hurt, maybe guns aren’t all that dangerous.

I noticed my purse with the 9mm Glock still inside it. I’d forgotten to lock it up! Panic set in as I realized my teen son was playing videogames just 10 feet away. What if he’d decided to get the socks I’d bought him from my purse while I was out on the deck? Thoughts raced through my mind and I pondered how I’d just straddled the fine line between being a responsible gun owner and an irresponsible idiot whose 15-year-old just accidentally shot himself or someone else with my gun.

I know I already posted this quote above, but I would like to highlight that she thinks her 15-year-old is irresponsible enough to blow himself away should he happen to come across a firearm.

I don’t know how she raised this kid, but sweet mother of Hades, is she really such an incompetent parent that her 15-year-old doesn’t have the basic commonsense to not immediately shoot himself if he stumbles across a gun? Given this article, it might be a possibility, but wow.

Maybe, instead of being a paranoid nut, she should teach her kid (and herself) proper firearm care and use (not to mention basic responsibility and commonsense). It might be more effective.

I learned that some gun owners aren’t very nice when you write something they don’t like. After my first post appeared on the Ms. Magazine site, I was called an “idiot,” “stupid,” “immoral,” “clueless,” “a coward,” and “dangerous.” One woman suggested I put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger—and several tried to reveal my home address on the moderated comments section.

An incompetent, paranoid woman runs a smear campaign against normal, law abiding people, painting them as violent, dangerous, and incompentent, then she’s surprised when the same people she’s smearing react negatively. The nerve of them.

She ends with this:

My experiment was 30 days of my personal experience. I’m just a mom who wanted to see what it felt like. Now I know.

She has no idea what a regular gun owner feels like, because most of us are not incompetent and paranoid. I know I have never thought about shooting the repair man for repairing my furnace.

As well, most gun owners actually try to learn how to use their weapon before carrying it.