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Dave Matheny: Guns don't have power to cloud minds, April 20, 2003

...Does the presence of a gun incline a person to use it? I could just tell you
it doesn't, but you might believe the results of a vast experiment better. The
experiment involved half a million Americans, mostly male, in their late teens
and early 20s, away from home, stressed out, with plenty of alcohol and drugs
around, more than half of them carrying machine guns. Sounds like Armageddon,
yes?

No, sounds like American forces in Vietnam, where a majority of the troops
carried M-16s. They got into fights, of course, but the fights were conducted
with fists, feet, elbows, whatever -- but almost never with guns. Ask any
Vietnam vet about the rarity of gunfights among the troops.

Actually, all our wars have been such experiments. But starting with World War
II, though, the guns were semiautomatics -- held to be very evil guns in
today's media -- moving into fully automatic assault rifles (good heavens)
since the 1960s. Even in Iraq: Apart from one soldier's alleged use of a gun
and hand grenades against fellow troops in the present Gulf war, there have
been no reports of American troops using their guns against each other.

Even in the Old West, when everybody had shoot in' irons, gunfights were pretty
goldurn rare, Hollywood notwithstanding. ...