I had a couple of rifles when I was a teenager. And I used to go hunting with friends. And it was a lot of fun, stomping around in the woods. But the killing of innocent wildlife turned sour for me pretty quickly. Why kill something that isn't a nuisance or threat to anyone, and isn't going to be eaten by anyone? It's pointless. And what makes my own life so special that I can casually end another life, for 'sport' ? Nothing at all.
But, I've toted with the idea of getting a BB gun to plink at stuff in the backyard, now that I have the land, because shooting as a sport is fun.
Still, when it comes to real guns, I'm with Josh Marshall:
In the current rhetorical climate people seem not to want to say: I think guns are kind of scary and don’t want to be around them. Yes, plenty of people have them and use them safely. And I have no problem with that. But remember, handguns especially are designed to kill people. You may want to use it to threaten or deter. You may use it to kill people who should be killed (i.e., in self-defense). But handguns are designed to kill people. They’re not designed to hunt. You may use it to shoot at the range. But they’re designed to kill people quickly and efficiently.
That frightens me. I don’t want to have those in my home. I don’t particularly want to be around people who are carrying. Cops, I don’t mind. They’re trained, under an organized system and supposed to use them for a specific purpose. But do I want to have people carrying firearms out and about where I live my life — at the store, the restaurant, at my kid’s playground? No, the whole idea is alien and frankly scary. Because remember, guns are extremely efficient tools for killing people and people get weird and do stupid things.
That's what gun-lovers love to ignore. The lunatic who picks up a gun and kills a bunch of people at once is a tragedy. But he's an aberration. Every year, there are many tens of thousands of sane people in the US who, in a moment of rage, or fear, or jealousy, or confusion, or plain old stupidity, get hold of one of the hundreds of millions of guns that pollute our country, and they make terrible decisions about how to solve the problems they're facing.
There are 100,000 deaths or injuries every year in the US due to guns. They aren't all due to crazy people. The bulk of them are from normal people, not psychiatric patients who will be reported to the local authorities for having violent thoughts. They're normal people who get weird and do stupid things with devices designed for the efficient destruction of soft tissue.
IMO, the second amendment is a curse. It has allowed guns to saturate our country even while we've developed a violent and short-sighted culture that would be far better off without them. But we're stuck with them now. And we're utterly without a way to do anything about that.