There's sporting use and self-defense, which I feel are legitimate uses. There are also collectors and other hobbyists, like the black powder/muzzle loading fraternity, historical re-enactors and the Western fanciers who like to fantasize about quick draw and and other cowboy pursuits. These are harmless perversions, and I feel perfectly benign ones, because these weapons, although deadly, are not optimized for mass killing on an industrial scale. Still, with enough guns on the street it is inevitable that some fraction will wind up being involved in accidents, suicides, crime or in the hands of mentally deranged people,

But then there's the combat shooter, the guy who is obsessed with the ballistic effect on human tissue of tactical pistol and assault rifle fire. These people are either police buffs (that should automatically qualify anyone for the funny farm) or see themselves as combat heroes, redneck Rambos ready to mow down their enemy should they ever be called to duty. They probably understand subconsciously that they are neither physically nor mentally capable of actually engaging in real combat operations, so they need to justify these violent fantasies with absurd, elaborate justifications of defending the nation and their freedoms against hordes of heavily armed urban criminals (code word for blacks), enemy infantry (the Red Dawn Patriots) or their own government, who they love to paint as a left wing cabal eager to shove atheistic Communism and health insurance down their throats.

Although this is mostly a right-wing, middle-aged, working-class rural white guy disorder, that is not necessarily the case. Remember the Black Panther Party, the Weather People and the Symbionese Liberation Army? Lefty gun nuts are in the minority these days, but they do exist. They mostly fantasize about shooting it out with skinhead militias, the KKK, or their own government, eager to shove fascism down their throats. Since there are much fewer of them, they turn up a lot less often on the news when they crack. But they are the same bird.

Even so, most of these guy, left or right, are all talk, and rarely pose a real threat to anyone, mostly because they lack the balls to actually put themselves in harm's way for no good reason. They just like to think of themselves as mighty warriors. The problem is that any attempt to control access to this type of weaponry is immediately perceived by them as the reason why they need them. It feeds on itself. This is why we have the elaborate constitutional justifications and appeals to abstract patriotic principle. And occasionally, especially when they get together in autoerotic self-righteous gangs like they did recently on the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, they can work themselves up into a real hissy fit.

Why does an overweight, short-of-breath, pasty-faced suburban slug who hasn't been in a fight since high school need to have a collection of military weaponry and big bore handguns? For the same reason they buy monster trucks when they live in the suburbs, or muscle cars when they will never be on a race track. Guns and cars are penis surrogates, they need to get laid more often. They have to come up with a valid excuse for what they do and cover up why or people will just laugh in their faces.

And that is what they're really afraid of.