 This is going to be very brief. I want to walk you through a rhetorical device I've found helpful in discussions with friends and family. I call it the hand grenade test. I've never met anyone who advocated for the legal right to carry concealed hand grenades. I suspect you, dear viewer, likewise do not support my right to carry concealed hand grenades into public areas. What is it about hand grenades that differentiates them from handguns, rifles, and shotguns? You've all seen hand grenades in war movies and the like. You pull the pin or the spoon or the safety handle, count to whatever, and toss it over medium ranges, a couple of meters or around a corner, and it explodes, spreading shrapnel and causing explosive damage to everyone in range. There are incendiary, stun grenades, smoke grenades, flashbangs, anti-armor, but I'm talking here about an anti-personnel fragmentation hand grenade. Why shouldn't we be allowed to carry them around a crowded movie theater, a football stadium, or down a New York subway? For me, it's the way they're designed. They're made in such a way as to cause damage indiscriminately to everyone in about a 15 meter range from wherever they land, with the possibility to harm people as far away as 200 meters. Soldiers use them to incapacitate enemy groups, to support a tactical movement, or to soften up a defensive position before an assault. They're virtually useless as a defensive weapon. If you were attacked by a knife-wielding thug, and your only defense was a hand grenade, you'd be better served to run the other direction, rather than risk the damage to yourself from a close proximity grenade explosion. I can't think of a legitimate reason why a private citizen would need to carry one. There's no defensive application. They aren't a very effective deterrent. Now consider the potential for misuse. Anyone trying to cause mass chaos to injure as many people as possible, or who was willing to kill innocents to escape law enforcement, would be the most likely to find a civilian use for this weapon. Let's term the benefits and defensive applications the use of a weapon, and the illicit use by criminals the misuse. The ratio of use to misuse for a hand grenade is very nearly zero. And that's why I don't see a need for people to carry one down the street. The same would be true for C4 explosive, a rocket launcher, or Claymore Mine. None of these have a legitimate defensive use, but a very high potential for misuse in civilian hands. Going down the scale we find high velocity, long barreled rifles, 50 caliber guns, some potential for proper use I suppose, but especially dangerous in the hands of a criminal with evil intent. If I look at a small snub-nosed revolver, I can see both use and misuse applications. It's ideal as a concealed self-defense weapon, but it would also be a good weapon to smuggle into a public place for violent use by a criminal. With the revolver though, even with a speedloader, it's going to be slightly harder to misuse for mass murder. I would assign the revolver a much higher ratio of use to misuse than a 50 caliber rifle. Some shotguns strike me as useful defensive weapons, but we saw at the Washington Navy Yard they also have potential for misuse. Nevertheless, I would rate their use to misuse ratio as relatively high. If I look at a baseball bat or a hunting knife, the potential for use and misuse are pretty balanced. That is a criminal would have a hard time doing more damage with it than a law-abiding person using it for self-defense. Both are very common weapons in domestic violence both by attacker and defender. It's not that it's less lethal, it's that it requires a deeper commitment to the action of harming, and it tends to be more specific as to the target. Lastly, we get to the less lethal like mace, taser guns and the like. Here there is some potential for misuse, but they are more useful to the law-abiding citizen than to the criminal, and obviously they're less lethal. So where do we place the contentious assault rifles, so called for select fire options or magazine eject functions or pistol grips on the front? The poor potential for defensive use might put them towards the hand grenade end of the ratio scale. In the hands of a violent criminal, they can deal out some massive loss of life. I'm sorry to say that I don't agree that all guns are evil. I think legislation on gun control should reflect the idea that there are specific design issues that make a gun more dangerous in its misuse than its defensive applications can offset. One of the US presidents recommended policies calls for additional efforts to pull assault weapons off the streets out of the hands of the criminals who would use them for massive loss of life. I concur with that initiative, and not because I want to see law-abiding people without defensive weapons. It's because I see a distinction in weapons, like the hand grenade, which can potentially do more harm than good. Thanks for watching.