Normal people don't take another person's life unnecessarily. People who are inclined to do so are considered sociopaths. Shoot First laws encourage normal people to act like sociopaths, and provide a way for sociopaths to kill with impunity.Really? If I were to hand Heather Martens a gun, does anyone think she'd shoot me with it if I looked at her crosswise? Perhaps she has a sociopathic toggle switch that flips every time she holds a gun in her hand, but I sure don't. I have never once held a gun and thought to myself, "hey, cool, now I can plug someone!" Have you?
I'd also be curious to see how a "Shoot First" law encourages a normal person to act like a sociopath. Does it trigger voices in your head?
Sociopaths are sociopaths and while a gun might make it easier for a sociopath to kill someone, random killings are exceedingly rare. And there are more ways to kill someone than with a gun. We saw evidence of that recently when some idiot got into an argument at a bar in Dinkytown, got into his car and ran down his purported antagonist, hitting a few innocent bystanders in the process. Did the car cause this idiot to kill?
If I really set my mind to it, I could kill someone with dozens of objects in my home before I ever got around to pulling out a gun. I have plenty of effective cutlery, baseball bats, paving stones, poison and more within a few steps of my home computer. Oddly enough, I've never killed anyone and none of the people who share my domicile have ever thought about using any of these implements of potential destruction to kill anyone, either.
The tool one chooses to kill isn't particularly relevant. Whether one wishes to act like a tool is another matter, of course. Sociopaths are out there -- there's little question of that. But there's no reason to believe that the presence of more effective tools will increase their number.
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