This morning, 8 January 2011, I was reading the latest news on the disgusting behavior of certain customers of Sophiestication Software. I was preparing some remarks in defense of Sophie when I heard the news about the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. As I formulated some remarks disparaging those who oppose gun control, I realized that the same line of thought runs through both events.

When Sophie put her app in the Mac Application Store, she had a difficult choice to make. Five years ago she said that upgrades would be free until version 3.0. There is no way to offer free upgrades on the Store. She could comply with the free upgrade policy by changing the version number to 3.0, even though “3.0″ implies new features when in fact no new features were added. Or she could keep the version number the same, as it honestly ought to be, and expect people to understand that it simply is not possible both to move to the store and to provide free upgrades.

She chose the honest alternative, and explained the reasons necessitating it. Sure enough, some customers complained, bitterly and profanely, that she had broken her promise to provide them free upgrades through version 3.0.

Time and again the complainers roared, in a variety of ways, some using deeply and personally offensive expletives: “It’s not the money; it’s the principle of the thing! You broke a promise! I hate you!”

That outburst brought to mind one of the lessons I learned in twenty years as a lawyer. I believe that most any lawyer will tell you the same thing: whenever a client says, “It’s not the money; it’s the principle of the thing,” you immediately escort them to the door.

Truth is, clients who believe that a principle has been offended never pay their lawyers.

They don’t expend any actual effort themselves, but they relish the opportunity to castigate another party for a perceived deficit of character. I speak from experience as a country lawyer. They exhibit no shortage of defects themselves (such as breaking their promise to pay their lawyer), but if they glimpse a fissure in an honest person’s wall of respectability they scruple not to press their mouth to it and shriek “Promise breaker! Promise breaker!”

Whenever I hear someone say, “It doesn’t matter whether $5 is a reasonable price; what matters is that you lied to me,” I think, yes, go ahead and indulge with orgiastic relish these fleeting seconds when you can trumpet your moral superiority. No one is listening. You are part of the background noise of life, nothing more.

That’s what I was thinking when the Congresswoman was assassinated.

The issue now changes to gun control.

My father was a gunsmith. He held a Federal Firearms License number. From my earliest memories, guns were ubiquitous in our home. My brother received a shotgun for Christmas at age 7. We read the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman magazine every month. As a youngster I learned all about the mechanical workings of a firearm. I developed a fondness for fine arms just as I later developed a fondness for fine guitars and violins. In my family, guns were just a part of life, like cars and kitchen utensils. Sure they could be dangerous if improperly handled, but the notion of mishandling a firearm was so utterly foreign to us that my parents (apparently) held no fear of raising two boys in a house full of guns. They were right. I was no more likely to touch a gun while my parents were absent than to smash all the windows in the house.

There were rules, and we all respected them. One day a man asked my father to lighten the trigger pull on a revolver. The man wanted to practice quick-draw shooting, like they did in the Old West. Dad declined, telling him that it was simply too dangerous. The man found another gunsmith to do the work. We later heard that he had shot his foot off.

My father, NRA member, gunsmith, hunter, and firearm aficionado, supported gun control. He thought every firearm should be licensed. We were a responsible family. It was no burden to us to demonstrate our knowledge of gun safety. Having worked with all sorts of gun owners we knew what a wild assortment of nutcases wants to own a gun. We loved guns and wanted them controlled for our own well-being.

That was fifty years ago. Today America is rife with little minds who consider gun control a personal indignity. I have heard them speak. I know many of them. Better, in their minds, nightly to bag up bodies of innocent victims than to dip a timid toe into the placid waters of regulation. Wouldn’t regulation prevent tragic deaths?  It’s not the content of the regulations, they reply, it’s the principle. The Second Amendment made a promise, and you can’t break your promises.

They are, in short, the same kind of people who roar like madmen over the version number of a $5 piece of software.

It would surprise me none if today’s assassin—whose victims included a nine-year-old girl—were among the self-righteous bigots who scorned Sophiestication Software.