Yes, but how does one actually acheive this ( separating the tech from the purpose the tech was created for) in the heat of the moment?
I tend to think in zen terms here, and I posit that you CANT do it, as the purpose and the object are, if not one and the same, then so close that the majority of people would be unable to do it.
As you yourself show, it is actually pretty easy to make these distinctions when you are calm and emotionally detatched, but our mammalian 'war machine' brains go to 'ignition' too fast for us to posess the ability to deliver instant erasure.
People like you, who have actually thought this out, and have sensible attitudes, woukl make the best gun owners, but funny enough, usually these people are well past the point of feeling they need one.
" Owning a gun with a readiness to kill is the supreme expression of intolerance"
I agree with you and percieve a WORLD of difference in the european attitudes and the American ones in this area. Killing is a BIG part of our heritage and culture here. The west STILL glorifies guns, war, and violence, and romanticizes the entire concepts.
To be honest with you, most americans do not even begin to understand the term 'respect'.
We are a quite disrespectful people, generally, who tend to see it as our BIRTHRIGHT to pull a gun on someone. We are taught way too much reverence for killing, from multiple angles and vectors.
If I take a 6 year old child and desensitize him by teaching him to kill animals, ( no, not for food, or self-defense, but a barbaric 'sport')
then I, without realizing it, have begun the process of dehumanization.
Once you've killed a few deer and gutted them, it becomes a lot easier to 'turn off the switch' and do some grisly stuff. This is the same 'switch' you turn off to kill any living thing.I know this, because I was taught all this, and I know what this culture is about.
Even target practice is only honing and sharpening their skills for killing.
....and why introduce a 5 year old child to this world in the first place?
Down here, thats the NORM, not the exception....children are basicaqlly indoctrinated into this crap, and have fully formed attitudes and beliefs about it WAY before they are able to think about it with any clarity.
Why are we weighing our advancement as a culture and race down by saddling ourselves with such psychological barriers?
These connections are real, it DOES get easier and easier to kill the more you do it, and it makes no difference in the psyche if you start on squirrels, prostitutes or Wild lions in Africa, Desensitizing is an unseparable part of hunting, which is the main way in westernized culture that guns are transmitted from one generation to the next.
It's wrong, period.