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Jun. 2nd, 2021 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariI don’t know why I react so negatively to the idea of firing a gun at someone. I mean, I don’t have anywhere near as negative a reaction to the idea of putting a knife through someone’s eye. But I try to imagine a situation where I would “self-defense” someone with a gun, and it just doesn’t seem like a thing I would do.
It could be that I can relate more easily to “this person must die” than “I must protect myself.” I try to picture some hypothetical situation where I kill someone, and even if they were trying to kill me, I wouldn’t call it “self-defense.” I’d call it killing, because it’s killing. So it’s specifically the language of “self-defense” around guns, rather than the guns themselves, and I don’t feel that way around knives because nobody calls knives “self-defense” in the first place. (In the same way, while there isn’t a plausible future where I carbomb someone, I can more easily imagine doing so, because the idea of coldly killing someone in that way is easier for me to understand than “self-defense”-ing them.)
It could be that I can relate more easily to “this person must die” than “I must protect myself.” I try to picture some hypothetical situation where I kill someone, and even if they were trying to kill me, I wouldn’t call it “self-defense.” I’d call it killing, because it’s killing. So it’s specifically the language of “self-defense” around guns, rather than the guns themselves, and I don’t feel that way around knives because nobody calls knives “self-defense” in the first place. (In the same way, while there isn’t a plausible future where I carbomb someone, I can more easily imagine doing so, because the idea of coldly killing someone in that way is easier for me to understand than “self-defense”-ing them.)
