Well, when I hear people go on and on about the _necessity_ of carrying around a device that offers dubious protection against extremely unlikely survival risks, while at the same time living a lifestyle that displays obvious disregard for extremely likely survival risks, I start to wonder about intellectual honesty, and suspect that this gun thing isn't really about pragmatic risk management, so much as that some people _really_ like guns, want to find rationalizations for the necessity of carrying their toy around with them everywhere, and enjoy the fantasy of some day being the guy who whips out his big one to save all the women and children (a fantasy in which he does way better than just hitting the bad guy once in the shoulder).
-harry