Just to touch lightly on two items in this thread.
Crush washers are almost never steel. In order to crush and seal properly, they need to be soft metal. Typical crush washers are in the brake lines of your vehicles- they are soft copper. And the washer under the head of your oil pan drain plug is usually aluminum.
I can attest to the "I would snap" thing.
One of my good friends and business colleagues, a very nice man who was also the rep for the roofing sub I worked with, reacted much the same way when I mentioned in passing about our doing firearms classes. He made some (hopefully) facetious comments about how he needed to be careful around me since I had guns and he didn't want to get shot.
And yes, he did the "I couldn't have a gun, I would worry that I would snap..." thing.
Projection, as mentioned above, is the correct name for it.
What makes people lefties is anger, stemming from a feeling of loss of control and the resulting fear.
I am not a psychologist, but that makes it easier to observe and understand the syndrome without the crippling effects of a modern college education.