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Armed and defenseless: A gun-loving pacifist

The subject came up before dinner as several sporting writers bragged, over glasses of Scotch, about their expensive gun vaults and the loaded pistols they keep bedside for “home defense.” When everyone had spoken but me, I said: “I keep all my guns in a locked safe to ensure that I cannot reach them quickly enough to hurt my enemies.”

Deep furrows appeared in their foreheads as they processed the words and came, one by one, to speechless recognition that I had, in fact, said what they thought I had said. Then someone changed the subject.

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