Guess what, you can be liberal and enjoy guns!  More to the point, liberals should try to understand Americans who enjoy guns -- many of whom used to be Democrats! -- instead of clucking and demonizing.

<Joe Nocera at the Times runs a daily tally of gun killings. He's not running a daily tally of how many people defend themselves with guns. For one thing we don't know about it most of the time. David Hemenway at Harvard is very pro gun-control and he thinks it happens about 80,000 times a year. If that's true, that means that guns are saving 10 times as many people as they're killing.>

Wow, "if that's true."

It's believable.

It doesn't make the 10,000 annual U.S. gun deaths any less tragic, though.

Obama likes drones and he likes guns. He is a liberal gun guy.

guns are important

Why wouldn't liberals like guns? What we (I) don't like is easy access to them. I like cars also, but I like them registered, and people trained to use them. "Guns bad" is demonizing a liberal stance, which makes it easier to not meet in the middle. 

crazy people getting guns and wiping out rooms full of people: hey, nobody likes that!

This notion that the only strategy with which people can defend themselves is with guns -- ie. by threatening someone with imminent death -- is evidence of the mass psychosis of all Americans, left AND right.  I do not accept that anyone needs a gun.  Ever.  Here's an observation: When guns are absent during interpersonal conflicts, people rarely die.

I am not buying the proposition that if people hadn't had access to guns to defend themselves 80,000 more people would die each year. And 30,000 people die from guns each year, not 10,000

A study of 198 Atlanta home burglaries during which people were home showed that in only 3 cases was someone able to use a gun to defend themselves. More disturbing was that in 6 cases the burglar obtained the victim's gun (see http://www.stat.duke.edu/~dalene/chance/chanceweb/103.myth0.pdf)