I believe the young should be taught how to handle and use a gun safely, since there is no way that the 200,000,000 guns in the U. S. will ever be eliminated. Knowledge is an important step in defense.

It's a totally UNimportant step. Next to useless.

I know how to make bombs - the sort of IEDs used in Afghanistan. Made quite a few of them when I was a student, from basic chemicals. Mainly just for the hell of it and to produce a louder bang than any firecracker I could buy; perhaps about the same explosive power as the thing the CIA used to assassinate Walter Rodney. They worked 100% reliably and would easily scale up to something that would take out a building. (I later read the US Army Improvised Munitions Handbook and realized that I'd done quite a lot of it practically already).

Now tell me how knowing any of that makes me one bit safer against somebody planting a pipebomb. (Somebody did, within lethal range of me, once - it got defused before I ever knew it existed).


Now what you folks wish to do when you go out to a theater or dinner or shopping mall, I could care less.

Most folks are going to go out a lot less if their home town is undergoing a zombie apocalypse with everybody carrying weapons because they're scared shitless of everybody else. The big winners from US gun paranoia are pizza delivery firms and Netflix.