You might remember Vine, the 6-second-video platform that was a precursor to TikTok.
One of the better-known vines was of a young man in his bathroom, with his shirt off if I remember correctly -- filming himself with his camera, waving a pistol at the mirror, going "brrrrr pop pop pop!" And then the gun in his hand went BLAM because the man was resting his finger on the trigger like an idiot.
The vine came to mind when I ran across a post on Reddit by another young man, bragging about his first hunting expedition, posting a photo of him with what he'd shot. Well, "hunting" "expedition", because the vehicle behind him was an RV, he didn't have a bit of dust or mud on his jeans, and what he'd shot was a squirrel. But never mind all that, it was his first kill! And the caption was "city folk don't know what it's like to make your first kill."
Both of these people are people you need to stay away from. The vine man because he's foolish enough with a firearm to be dangerous, and the reddit man because he clearly doesn't take the matter of killing living creatures seriously.
We glorify guns themselves in this country, especially pistols, which is why the vine man was waving around his own. We treat them as tools of power and intimidation, as things to make us look cool and heroic, following the lead of all the action movies we watch.
But let's be clear: they're tools for a job, and the job is a hard one that most people, thank goodness, do not have the guts for. So don't glorify firearms, because then you're glorifying the job they're made for, and there's never any glory there, just blood spilling out on the dirt. Don't wave the damn things around to scare people. Just pick your target, take the shot, bow your head, and then go home and drink until you forget most of the day.