by Jeff Cooper
My dictionary describes an obsession as “a haunting by a fixed idea.” A haunting is a nagging, continuous fear of the unreal. A fixed idea is one that cannot be altered, by truth or reason or anything else.
Phobia is listed as “fear, horror, or aversion — of a morbid character. “Morbid” is “unwholesome, sickly. ”
Those of us who shoot cannot help being perplexed when we encounter people who are apparently haunted by a fixed and morbid aversion to our guns. When first we meet such persons we generally respond with explanations, as is only reasonable. But with time we discover that often we are not dealing with rational minds. This is not to say that everyone who is opposed to shooting is mentally aberrant, but it is to say that those who latch on to an unreasonable notion and thereafter refuse to listen to any further discussion of it have problems that are more amenable to psychiatry than to argument.