I hate people who treat them like some toys and fantasize about them. That makes me think they are in some sort of death cult. That they found socially acceptable way to love violence.
I would still get one for safety but it is a tool made for specifically one thing. To pierce the skin and rip through the inner organs of a person.
They can serve a good purpose but they are fundamentally grim tools of pain and suffering. They shouldn’t be celebrated and glorified in their own right, that is sick. They can be used to preserve something precious but at a price to pay.
There are too many responses here to reply to all of them individually so I’m just going to post some quotes here, more in response to other comments than the OP, but perhaps also a perspective to consider for OP as well.
“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”
And the shockingly only increasingly relevant full quote from one of the founders of the Black Panthers party:
“Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it’s off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves.”
I’d really ask more people to consider their position of privilege, to be less afraid of state sanctioned or enabled violence of all forms than some crazy neighbor with guns who was likely failed many times by that very state to have come to this point. Please just consider the counterpoint, that armed minorities are harder to oppress, and that far, far more people have been killed by state sanctioned and enabled violence, than by access to firearms by “the common people”.
I’m not telling anyone that they’re wrong, I’m just asking that you really internalize and consider this perspective. Thank you for reading and thinking.