Reluctant Hobbyist
Let me get this straight up front: I understand why people enjoy this hobby. Shooting is fun. It can be a niche hobby, or more casual, sometimes with a broad spectrum of in-betweeners. For the most part, people are seemingly nerds about guns for the exact same reasons people are nerds about collectible cards, cars, or anything else people geek out about.
What absolutely ruins the hobby for me are the incessant (and often laughable) paranoid life or death fantasies that I continually see and hear projected by firearms enthusiasts on YouTube, in stores, and at the range- and it's always accompanied by that their aggressive need to "well actually" back and forth about whose fantasy is most prudent.
I understand there is a real seriousness to the use cases for weapons and believe that ceding competency and understanding of tools, and especially weapons, to conservatives is absolutely the worst idea.
I've long since changed my privileged views from seeing firearms as a needless hazard, whose mere presence most often creates the opportunity for more danger to their owners than is outweighed by the benefit of a defensive option. But I will never not get the yuck every time I hear some white, cis, upper-middle class, suburbanite go off and scoff/scold about someone wanting a manual safety, or storing their weapon without a round in the chamber, or keeping unattended weapons in a locked safe instead of loaded, hammer-back and ready to grab off the kitchen table at a moments notice - all because their inserted fantasy attacker is just waiting for them to be 3 seconds less prepared for their fantasy scenario.
Where do we draw the line between feeding a paranoid fantasy and just being a "normal" healthy, knowledgeable tool user? Most of the time, I conceal carry without a round in the chamber and with my manual safety on, because my rational level of comfort says that spending a mere extra second to rack a round and thumb my safety is a completely sane sacrifice to have that extra layer of circumstance to reduce the chance of accidentally blowing my own dick off.
I fully expect this post to go up in flames, because my consistent experience has been that it's almost completely ingrained in the overwhelming majority of gun culture to propagate shamelessly all of the quick-draw survival situation fantasy with little ro no regard to any other safety measures.
I feel like I'm the only one even weighing this tradeoff and noticing this.
TLDR: Do you feed the paranoid life or death fantasy in your own head, or do you take measures to reel it in and live a more rational reality?
EDIT: Formatting - because it was midnight, I'm new to reddit and figured I'd get auto formatted to save space, and even though this is mostly a rant, and I included a TLDR, y'all are literally crying for paragraphs.