Reason, Guns and Cognitive Dissonance

This morning during my daily news reading, twoseemingly opposing statementscollided in my head.

“An armed society is a polite society.” “I shot him/her because I thought he/she had a gun.”

The former is an aphorism used by gun rights advocates as an assurance that if more people were armed, there were would be less violence in our society. The latter is what I have read repeatedly in stories involving an armed person—on-duty or off-duty policeman or armed civilian—give as the reason that th...