Thank you, Mr. Wallace, for your thoughtful, sane, and insightful assessment of the true moral dilemma that we all must face if we contemplate the possession of a weapon of lethal purpose. For those who are considering the purchase of a weapon that can kill instantaneously, and do so in multiple iterations, your assessment is sound, sensible and balanced. Here we all are, in the 21st Century, still obsessed with weapons of mass destruction ... in our neighborhoods as well as across our borders into other countries. It's amazing that the human species as managed to survive this long.

I suspect the aliens who dropped by to visit us back in the Stone Age, etc., may have been conducting an experiment to see how long it would take a sentient species of murderous, predatory apes to evolve to the level of mass destruction and suicidal self-annihilation that would cause our mutual extinction. It would not be surprising if they are sitting just outside the range of our technological perception today, taking bets and sitting around their huge monitoring screens watching as the drama unfolds today.