I have some recollection that all those right wingers had a hissy fit when Obama mentioned bitter people who cling to their guns, and now that he is president, they go off and prove him right all along.

It’s another sign of an economic downturn: more guns in pawnshops and gunstores.  Guns maintain their value, so they are a good “safety” investment.  The stores are buying and selling a lot of them right now, but the number of new customers isn’t growing as much as the volume would suggest.

A climate of fear is an undercurrent right now (and always with the usual suspects,) but it’s not just racism and blackhelicopteria that’s at play.  There’s a lot of talk about the dollar tanking, a need to buy non-perishable food and some gold, a need to learn to farm, and similar survivalist talk on the internet.  And everywhere else.  The pessimists have done the math, and things look like a negative for a long time to come.  Throw a black President into that mix, and the hysteria gets worse for some people.  Obama didn’t set up the current gunsale environment, but for some people he’s just the catalyst to get them buying.  But if Biden or Clinton or even McCain was President right now, the numbers would probably be about the same, only the chatter would be different.

I’ve been to the shooting range a couple of times since the election (I try to practice once a month or so).  It’s been very very busy.  No Nazis, no skin heads, no militia.  Just ordinary people, men and women, black, brown and white, old and young, just ordinary Americans concerned that their rights are about to be infringed.  Lots of young people taking lessons.  These are the people you ALWAYS see at shooting ranges and skeet shooting.  Not the stereotypes that some have.  If you doubt this, sign up for a class and see for yourself the wide variety of people taking lessons.  You’ll probably enjoy yourself, might even make some new friends.  You could even paste a picture of GB on your target and shoot him out (I think Hillary and Osama are the more usual targets).

In the store section, business is booming.  People are concerned that there will be new restrictions.  In particular, rifles, shotguns, and other weapons more likely to be banned are selling out. 

Obama “said” he believes in the Second Amendment, and gun owners need not fear him.  I did not believe him.  But we’ll see.

One of the amusing things here is that some of these Know-Nothings (most likely pretend mill-yon-ares like Joe Da Plumber) are taking their cue from Wall Street tools of the sort described in this article—hedge funders buying gold and guns. Of course, if the apocalyptic fantasies of the racist yahoos came true, those bored multi-millionaires would have long abandoned the survivalist play acting, and would already be relaxing at beachfront villas abroad.

You could even paste a picture of GB on your target and shoot him out (I think Hillary and Osama are the more usual targets).

Most liberals that I know, including the gun owners, don’t share your sick eliminationist fantasies.

You could even paste a picture of GB on your target and shoot him out (I think Hillary and Osama are the more usual targets).

But it’s totes not about wankers and their murder fantasies. Nope, totes not. It’s about RIGHTS. And maybe also penises.

Libertarian’s comment above helps illustrate the difference between stupid libertarians and smart ones. The former cling fearfully to their assault rifles and pistols as security blankets, while the latter buy stock in firearms manufacturers and take equity in local shooting ranges/gun shops, the better to profit from the suckers.

Not the stereotypes that some have.

That’s all the left has is stereotypes. Most have never been to a gun range or even shot a gun in their lives. They simply don’t know what they are talking about

People are concerned that there will be new restrictions.  In particular, rifles, shotguns, and other weapons more likely to be banned are selling out.

Exactly right. If you want ‘em, now’s the time to buy ‘em. And it’s not just Obama’s election, but the control of everything by Democrats who have always wanted to get the guns. Now, the public feels they have that ability. The “assault weapons” ban was an eye opener and, of course, had absolutely no effect at all on crime or anything else.

“ut if Biden or Clinton or even McCain was President right now, the numbers would probably be about the same, only the chatter would be different. “

Dunno.  A lot of it is, yes, people who’ve been spooked by the economy looking for a “solid investment” or going for the old standby of “guns, booze, and canned goods” or wanting something they can hunt with so as to take the edge off their grocery bill.  A lot more of it is also people who’ve had the NRA screaming that ZOMbama is going to ban this, that, and the other for a full year trying to get it while they can.  Since the frenzy has allowed dealers to jack up their prices and resulted in suppliers taking months-long backorders, it’s started feeding on itself, with nervous gun-enthusiasts turning panicky because it turns out that you already can’t get (for lack of supply) a lot of the things they want while dealers eager to keep up the inflated prices play up the risk of a ban and the current scarcity.

The scary thing about this is that I know people who aren’t even that wingnutty, just garden variety conservatives, who have openly talked about how they should buy more guns now because of Obama.

Then again, conservatives always want an excuse to buy more guns.  It’s like me in the wine store - “Oh, uh, isn’t it supposed to snow this weekend?  Well you never want to run out of wine in a snowstorm, right?”

Angst and Libertarian-

I am a gun owner.  I shoot skeet and target shoot.  I worked as a puller all through high school.  Most of the people who shoot are as you said; nice, normal people who like to do something that, let’s face it, is pretty damn cool.  They’re multi-cultural, and multi-generational.

But there ARE the other ones.  The skin-heads, the nutzos, the people who confuse they’re gun for their penises.  They do exist.  And they are worrisome.

Must like the left has the stereotype as the crazy environmentalist.  Most of them are not nuts, most of them are simply concerned about the environment.  Then there are those who stake tree.  The idea of a “Nutty environmentalist” is a stereotype: most are not.  But some are.

Same with gun owners.

As for everyone else, Obama has said that this is not a priority for him, and I believe him.  I think he has an economy and a war to worry about.  But, I think it is something to be concerned about.  I don’t want to lose my favorite hobby.

My own anecdotal experience bears this out in spades.  I have a gun collection of my own, and a few weeks ago I went to my local gun store to offload a “scary-looking” AR-15 rifle (black, collapsible stock, flash suppressor, 30-round banana clip, the whole shebang), because I figured I’d get the best price for it now and I was hardly ever using it.

The place was jammed.  I mean packed like sardines, could barely move without constant “Scuse me, sorry, scuse me.”  Men and women both, but mostly men.  The owners said it had been like that since the election, they could barely keep anything in stock, and yes, it was all about stocking up “before it’s illegal or they put a big fat tax on guns.”

The Tennessee DOJ computers were so slammed with background checks that it took eight hours for them to get back the clear title on my rifle so they would buy it.

I’ve been going to this gun store for five years, and I’ve never ever ever seen anything remotely like it.

Just ordinary people… Not the stereotypes that some have.

“Libertarian”—as I get older as come to meet more people, it has been my experience that some people appear, on the outside, to be perfectly nice, normal people, but, after you speak to them for a bit, you realize they are completely crazy. It’s a large country and a prosperous country—large enough and prosperous enough to contain and provide leisure time for people to explore their personal conspiracy theories or flat-earther beliefs.

I’m sure the people at your gun range are nice—even within the blogosphere, MattY, McMegan and others post about making trips to the shooting range (I myself have my handgun training class certificate somewhere on my shelf). However, “he seemed like a perfectly ordinary person” is what people always say about someone who later turns out to be crazy.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” applies to the guy in khakis and a polo shirt as much as it applies to the guy with tattoos and a funny haircut.

My brother in law loaded up on three new guns over the holiday, and it was absolutely because of this ridiculous Obama-is-going-to-send-the-jackbooted-thugs-to-take-our-guns meme that got circulated around.

It’s amazing.  Nothing about Obama’s candidacy or history suggests that gun law is on his agenda, but people just make shit up, and then other people start to believe it.

...Because all the skinheads, neo-nazis, and paramilitary survivalists hang out at suburban gun clubs. Gosh, just like McVeigh did.

Guys, pointing out that some people do whatever is under discussion sensibly does not invalidate the concerns about the ones who don’t.

Are you really under the impression that these militia types are just like a bowling league, just at the local shooting range?

This is “Homeland Security”, after all.  Timothy McVeigh was a homegrown Christian white boy, who never once felt an ounce of regret for blowing up the Murrah Building or even for killing the babies in the daycare center.

Which is yet another reason I’m happy that Janet Napolitano is heading up that department.  As governor of Arizona, I’m guessing she’s dealt with these sorts of people in the past.

http://hasobamatakenawayourgunsyet.com/

As for everyone else, Obama has said that this is not a priority for him, and I believe him.  I think he has an economy and a war to worry about.  But, I think it is something to be concerned about.  I don’t want to lose my favorite hobby.

To what extent does Obama have any power over this?  I mean, gun control is usually a legislative (occasionally judicial) issue.  And Bush certainly had his share of unpopular pet projects that went nowhere.

Dianne Feinstein who said on cbs “60 Minutes,” fresh from seeing her Clinton gun ban enacted in 1994, “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . ‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in,’ I would have done it.”

Its not Obama that gun owners need to worry about. It is the House and Senate.

Well, Obama is the guy who’s going to sign it in.  An unfortunate hiccup (I think) in liberal philosophy is a fair majority (or at least plurality) of them are anti-gun, and democrats find it very easy to use gun rights as a bone to throw.  Obama may not make it a priority, but he sure as hell isn’t going to defend it.

Can I just note the bitter, bitter irony that a great many of the people who would consider Barack Obama a tyrant in the unlikely event that he did anything that might - kinda, if you’re already worried about such things - be construed as an attempt to take away their guns, have spent the last eight years working very hard to control people’s sex lives?  You have no right to be gay, and you have no right to contraception if it conflicts with the pharmacist’s beliefs to give it to you, but don’t you dare even think of infringing on my right to own a deadly weapon!

The simple fact of the matter is no one much cares about gun law right now.  If you work to pass a gun control law right now, you get major negatives with the “gun crowd”, but you don’t major positives with anyone.  No one wants to go to the wall for a piece of legislation that will only have downside for them.  It simply isn’t going to happen.

Well, Obama is the guy who’s going to sign it in.

Sure.  And Bush was the guy who was going to sign that bill on Social Security <strike>Demolition</strike> Reform.  Except it never made it to his desk.  Again, all Presidents have their unpopular pet projects which never come to fruition.  This is why we have a bicameral legislature, three branches of government, and a system of checks and balances to oversee the whole thing.

Seraph:

They got a little confused by the old “This is my weapon, this is my gun” chant.

No, I’m not saying it’d be Obama’s pet project; I’m saying it’d be Congress’s pet project, and Obama’s just not going to defend it.

Antigone, that was my one and only concern about getting Barack Obama his 60-vote majority in the Senate.  I gave money and walked precincts for Obama because everything else is more important, but I am still nervous about what a 60-Dem Senate would hand him that he would have no problem signing.

I am a strong believer that citizens have the right to be armed in their own defense.  I’m an equally strong believer that the govt has no damn business in my bedroom, and has no damn business interfering in my personal medical decisions (including my choice of pain relievers and mood-changers, so I’m kinda stuck there).

Sigh.  Nobody loves a lesbian with a gun collection. 

Most have never been to a gun range or even shot a gun in their lives.

Ha!  Talk about dealing in stereotypes.  I haven’t gone shooting in years, but I’m sure my dad still has my targets somewhere.  He was pretty proud about what great aim his little girl had.  Of course, now you’ll probably try to tell me I’m not a “real” liberal so you can maintain your little fantasies about how liberals “really” are.

The vast majority of honest to God gun nuts are somewhere between stamp collectors and Civil War buffs on the scary threat meter. A gun nut is something completely different from a white supremacist or militia survivalist. For the former, its just a hobby and not much else.

Obama has said that this is not a priority for him

My sense is that it’s not a priority for most liberals.  I’m for licensing & registration of handguns in particular—I grew up in a rural area and can see the value of a small rifle and/or shotgun for various critter-related needs—but at this point I really don’t give a crap if Red Dawn fantasists want to keep a small arsenal as long as I and people I care about are able to completely avoid them.  It’s their kids, not mine, who’ll get killed at gun shows or while showing the guns off to their cousins, and their sisters who’ll be shot during domestic disputes, and their alienated teenagers who’ll blow their own brains out.  It’s all sad, of course, but I’m really beyond caring enough to deal with the political battles involved.  And yes, I know it’s elitist to rely on social segregation to protect my own, but again, it’s just not worth the trouble to fight ‘em.

No, I’m not saying it’d be Obama’s pet project; I’m saying it’d be Congress’s pet project, and Obama’s just not going to defend it.

I’m not sure who in Congress you’re picturing is going to be the champion of banning guns, especially after District of Columbia v. Heller.  Who are you picturing introducing a constitutional amendment to repeal the Second Amendment and who do you think is going to vote “yes” on it?

No, I’m not saying it’d be Obama’s pet project; I’m saying it’d be Congress’s pet project, and Obama’s just not going to defend it.

Count the votes.  Especially in the Senate.

New gun regs aren’t going anywhere.  The NRA won this battle in the 90s and the Democratic Party has shifted to the center on this issue (as with so many others) because of the coalition they’ve re-built.  Right now the gun manufacturers are seeing the opportunity to play the rubes for suckers and get big sales in a down economy.  It’s working well for them, and the suckers seem to want to spend the money, so whatever.

The only way new gun regs come down is if there’s some major bout of gun violence that shows up because a nutter who shouldn’t have had a gun in his hands anyway goes out and creates a national tragedy.  So if one of these idiot militiamen decides to go shoot some politicians (or gods forbid, the President), you’ll see new gun regs come down HARD - and even Republicans will be hard pressed to vote against them.  If we get another Columbine, you’ll see new gun regs.  Beyond that I doubt we’ll see any movement on gun issues at all in the next decade - the Democratic coalition just isn’t as anti-gun as it was in the 70s and 80s.

jon on 01/22 at 08:21 AM had a good point. It’s not just fear of Obama (though that’s a lot of it.)

I’ve been thinking about learning to shoot, too. If this economy gets fucked up enough, even people who aren’t NRA types might want to consider getting some kind of protection. And if there are a lot of NRA types around you, it makes more sense to get a gun in order to deter those fuckers.

I’m saying it’d be Congress’s pet project, and Obama’s just not going to defend it.

As others have said, Gun Control doesn’t seem to be on the radar much these days, there are much bigger fish to fry, and several reasons not to press the issue.

Not to mention that anything too radical might be seen as unconstitutional in light of the recent SCOTUS ruling. 

While I’m not necessarily in favor of radical gun control, it’s just not a reason to be “worried” about Obama, for me.  That’s like being “worried” that he would sign a bill advocating reparations to the descendents of slaves.  Sure, I suppose Obama might sign such a bill.  But it’s unlikely to come up, so why be overly concerned about it?

I’m much more worried that all his talk about diplomacy over military force will turn out to be a load of bull, he won’t be serious about women’s rights, he’ll be bad on gay rights, he’ll continue to pay lip service to the Religious Right…  And even more than that, I’m worried that the Republicans will retake house and senate seats and recreate the Clinton administration, hounding him at every turn so that almost nothing can be accomplished.

““President-elect Obama is going to be the spark that arouses the ‘white movement,’ ” reads a posting on the National Socialist Movement Web site. “

I hope they’re right. I hope it arouses the ‘white movement’ to the point where they become a clear and obvious enough threat that they get slapped down hard, so hard that, for the next two decades or more, no “Sovereign White Man” will be able to show his face on a public street for fear of being recognized and imprisoned.

Is that so much to ask?

My recurring nightmare was that some loon was going to take Obama out before he made it through the Oath.  Morbid as it seems, I breathed a sigh of relief once he was through.  Even if they were to somehow get him now, we can at least say we’ve had an African-American President.  There’s no going back now.

“That’s all the left has is stereotypes. Most have never been to a gun range or even shot a gun in their lives. They simply don’t know what they are talking about”

Angst - You are wrong. Talk about stereotypes. Geez.

What is a “Sovereign White Man” ?

This all makes me think of the Moxy Früvous song “Michigan Militia”...

Hom Lee: Google ‘sovereign citizenship’ to get the low-down, but the short version is that a “sovereign citizen” is one who believes he (I’m sure there are female examples, but I’m equally sure they’re rare) deserves every right and privilege which comes with American citizenship and a whole stack besides, but doesn’t feel a need to bear any of the responsibility that goes along with it. Basically it’s someone who not only desires to be a law unto himself, but actually believes it is within his power to make that happen.

And—better sit down, I just know this part will utterly flabbergast you—there’s a lot of overlap between that particular batshit-insane-and-evil American subculture, and the white-supremacist/militia movement.

Count me as another liberal who isn’t opposed to gun ownership per se, and has done a little shooting in his time. As a result, though, I take firearms very seriously. They’re tools that even a moron can use, but tools with all the stopping power of heavy machinery or an automobile, and tools whose explicit purposes include killing other people. So I have no problem with certification/licensing regulations to demonstrate proper safety training, and I have no problem with waiting periods or concealed carry permits or restrictions on ownership of fully operational assault weapons. The Second Amendment does not exclude any of those things.

What I do have a problem with are the yahoos who use the Second Amendment as a free pass for arseholeish and irresponsible behaviour—not only to yell “fire” in a crowded theatre (to use the First Amendment example), but to burn the bloody theatre down. If you want evidence, look at the NRA, which now appeals exclusively to a Know-Nothing constituency that wets the bed worrying about roaming “illegal immigrant gangs” and Jewish puppetmaster financiers straight out of Der Stuermer (think I’m exaggerating? Go to the link and download the PDF).

I mean, really, pasting up pictures of Hillary or Obama or even Prince Bush to use at the range indicates a level of immaturity that would have me questioning the person’s fitness to vote in a country that values regular and peaceful transfers of power, let alone provide a serious analysis of the Second Amendment.

I’ve been thinking about learning to shoot, too. If this economy gets fucked up enough, even people who aren’t NRA types might want to consider getting some kind of protection.

If protecting your home from intruders is the goal, a shotgun is the best choice. Relatively easy to use and maintain (if properly trained), easy to hit your target in close quarters. But best of all, the distinctive sound of its being cocked usually scares off most intruders before you even see them.

If preparing for some sort of red-blue civil war is the goal, though, you’re the same fool’s errand as these Know-Nothings.

“My recurring nightmare was that some loon was going to take Obama out before he made it through the Oath.  Morbid as it seems, I breathed a sigh of relief once he was through.”

The security precautions in place made it pretty much impossible, I very strongly suspect, for anyone to get to Obama with anything less than a mortar, or a full-sized artillery piece.

That said—I breathed my own sigh of relief when he completed the Oath, and another when the ceremony ended without violence. Sad to say, isn’t it?

The security precautions in place made it pretty much impossible, I very strongly suspect, for anyone to get to Obama with anything less than a mortar, or a full-sized artillery piece.

Except when he is in Cadillac One. Then even a mortar or artillery piece couldn’t get him since that thing has battleship armor on it!

Gracchus-

My friend likes to tell the story of how he scared off an intruder by dry-cocking (ie, cocking without an ammunition chambered) his shotgun.  Good times.

Shotgun’s good, with the added benefit of not generally going through your neighbor’s walls and hit standby people.  Personally, I like .22’s because the ammunition’s cheap.

Gracchus

Just to be clear.  I did not say Obama.  I said Osama.

Why wouldn’t it be fun to shoot at Bin Laden?

Get a sense of humor.  One of the things you notice a shooting ranges is that people are having fun. Yes, it’s a fun activity.  Personally I use plain targets showing a man with a gun.  But if someone has more fun shooting at a picture, who cares?  I occassionally shoot at a place called The Bullet Hole.  They sell T-shirts with a target (round) on the front.  People buy the shirt, put it out on a target, shoot a few actual bullets through it, then wear them.  See?  Fun.

I don’t deny there are some dangerous people/groups that want to use guns for the “wrong” reason.  But those are the very small minority.  Pam’s headline “Radical gun nuts…” is wrong.  People who are concerned about gun restrictions include the radical fringe + lots of other people.  As I said above, talk is cheap.  Let’s see what he and his Dem Congress do.  Then we’ll know.  In the meantime, people are voting with their $$$$$ that there will be more restrictions coming.

“That’s all the left has is stereotypes. Most have never been to a gun range or even shot a gun in their lives. They simply don’t know what they are talking about”

Uh, yeah.  “John Moses Browning is God” is a sentence that escaped my lips recently, so I don’t think that you’re quiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite on the ball with this one.

I’m also a liberal gun owner with a concealed carry permit. I believe the 2nd gives people the right to have defensive weapons. Handguns and shotguns? Yes. Machine guns and bazookas? No.

Moore killed the gun control movement with “Bowling for Columbine”. Not that it was a bad movie or anything like that, it just kinda missed the mark. It made clear that the problem with guns wasn’t the guns, but what the guns represented…which was pure fear of the other.

Every once in a while you see a locality take up the issue, but you won’t see anything else federally on this issue, with the exception of either some sort of knee-jerk reaction to a current event or some sort of plugging of licensing loopholes, for at least a generation.

Gracchus, all excellent and totally agreed, with one quibble:  “fully operational assault weapons.”  If you mean full-auto, machine gun, one trigger pull = multiple bullets, then I am 100% with you.  But if you mean the small-caliber but “scary looking” black semiautomatic rifles that were banned in 1994, I have to ask why.

Libertarian: plenty of nice people own guns. The people who are stockpiling guns and ammo in the leadup to the inauguration are, really, “radical gun nuts.” Even if the have a nice haircut and ironed shirts.

Elmo is right, the assault weapons ban was stupid. It banned guns for looking scary!

“Most liberals that I know, including the gun owners, don’t share your sick eliminationist fantasies.”

This liberal gun owner definitely does not. 

“Get a sense of humor.”

The clueless white male privilege theme song.

is you mean the small-caliber but “scary looking” black semiautomatic rifles that were banned in 1994, I have to ask why.

I believe it was precisely because they were semi-automatic rifles.

I believe it was precisely because they were semi-automatic rifles.
Tyro on 01/22 at 11:35 AM

Bzzt! Wrong. Semiautos were not banned, only ones that looked a certain way.

Tyro:  Couldn’t be, because the ban didn’t affect all semi-autos, not by a long shot, and banned lots of things that had nothing to do with the trigger pull.  It banned things like flash suppressors, folding or collapsible stocks, and yet did NOT ban a semi-automatic action.

It was so ridiculous that the ban made one type of gun illegal if it was black, but the SAME GUN remained 100% legal if it were, say, pink.

Get a sense of humor.

Tell it to the TSA when you’re at the airport.

I defer to the self-proclaimed gun-experts here. From what I remember (this was the early 90s) it had something to do with magazine size, the semi-automatic nature of the guns, ability to be converted to fully automatic, etc.

I can see how “because they look scary” might have been a popular criticism amongst gun hobbyists.

Tyro-

Trust me, when they were crafting the assualt weapons ban, they never bothered actually consulting anyone who had any ideas about guns.  California runs into this problem a lot.

Tyro:
I am neither a gun expert, nor (certainly!) a “self-proclaimed” expert on anything.  But it really isn’t hard to look this stuff up, and your “from what I remember” is just faulty.

The ban only applied to certain semi-automatic weapons, and it addressed only cosmetic features of those weapons.  From Wikipedia:

By former U.S. law the legal term assault weapon included certain specific semi-automatic firearm models by name (e.g., Colt AR-15, H&K;G36E, TEC-9, all non-automatic AK-47s, and Uzis) and other semi-automatic firearms because they possess a minimum set of features from the following list of features:

A semi-automatic AK-47 rifle.
An Intratec AB-10 with 32-round magazine; a semi-automatic pistol formerly classified as an Assault Weapon under Federal Law.Semi-automatic rifles able to accept detachable magazines and two or more of the following:
Folding stock
Conspicuous pistol grip
Bayonet mount
Flash suppressor, or threaded barrel designed to accommodate one
Grenade launcher (more precisely, a muzzle device which enables the launching or firing of rifle grenades)

Tyro-

Trust me, when they were crafting the assualt weapons ban, they never bothered actually consulting anyone who had any ideas about guns.

Not to mention how many people I’ve talked to who think semiauto=fully auto. *facepalm*  I.e., “But we can’t overturn the AWB, then people will have machine guns!”

Years ago my husband and I were down in Atlanta going to an antique show which, as it happened, was sharing a huge space with a gun show. We accidentally went around a curtain and found ourselves among the lunatics. A huge, bearded, fat guy looked up and said flatly “you people don’t belong here.” And we backed slowly out.

aimai

Just to be clear.  I did not say Obama.  I said Osama.

Oh, I know you didn’t. But we both know that someone’s been making some good bank over the past 6 months printing up Obama targets.

Shoot at boogeymen like Osama or Khmoneni or Hitler or Mr. Generic Criminal all you want—lots of fun, I guess (I prefer standard silhouettes). But when Americans use portraits of their own high-profile politicians as targets and then ramble on about their own “patriotism,” that’s a problem. I’ve also found that kind of shooter who “has a sense of humour” about these things is also the kind of shooter who doesn’t take his firearms seriously.

If you mean full-auto, machine gun, one trigger pull = multiple bullets, then I am 100% with you.

That’s exactly what I meant. The clarification is welcome. That said, I don’t give exceptions for the semi-automatic assault rifles that can easily be turned into full-autos with those gun-show kits.

Personally, I like .22’s because the ammunition’s cheap.

You get what you pay for in terms of the pistol’s stopping power. A big guy in heavy clothes will keep coming if hit by a .22 anywhere but the head. Good for target shooting, though.

Also, dry-cocking is fine and usually does the job, but if you’re really planning on using a firearm on an intruder it’s better to have the ammo loaded, just in case the guy is too much of a moron to recognise the sound (always a fair bet with criminals).

What most of these shooting range and even the NRA yahoos (military types excepted) don’t understand is that if you’re about to confront someone with a firearm, it had better be loaded, you’d better to be prepared to shoot, and you’d better be prepared to take the consequences of that action. If they’re not teaching that stuff to the BART Police, I doubt they’re teaching it over at “The Bullet Hole.”

Of course, I need to “get a sense of humour” about these things. Strange what being 2 yards away from a fugitive bank robber brandishing a pistol will do to a guy.

Add me to the list of lefty gun owners.  Same for my brother and father, and were pretty good with them as we practice regularly.  As for the comment early in the thread about pasting a GB image on a target…all three of my “local” ranges prohibit the use of a person’s image as a target (other than standard police style target figures).  I was scolded for using a clown poster once…

Anyone who believes that either shotguns or hunting rifles will have any meaningful increase in regulation is psychotic. 

I can grasp folks running in to pick up a .50 cal sniper rifle; those are almost certainly going to come off the market over the next few years.  Of course, anyone who owns one of those outright terrifies me.  But there is absolutely no possibility that rifles or shotguns will be regulated.

There is a possibility that the ammunition of both of those will be regulated, but that will be for environmental reasons (lead shot), not gun-control reasons, as has been the case in the past as well.

I agree with the folks above that I have better things to do at this time than try to keep the gun nuts from murdering members of their own families.  That’s what local law enforcement and “moving to the city where the jobs are” are for.

Sorry, “hunting rifles or shotguns.”

Punditus Maximus—

I don’t think handguns will be regulated, either. Let’s face it, the Democratic Party has given up on gun control at the federal level for several reasons. Right wing gun owners are in a time warp on that one, back in 1996 at the latest. Chairman Dean had an “A” rating from the NRA, for God’s sake!

Gracchus:
You and I are totally and completely on the same page.  And I particularly agree with this part:

But when Americans use portraits of their own high-profile politicians as targets and then ramble on about their own “patriotism,” that’s a problem. I’ve also found that kind of shooter who “has a sense of humour” about these things is also the kind of shooter who doesn’t take his firearms seriously.

Guns aren’t toys.  They can be fun, yes, in the same way that driving a truck can be fun, using a chainsaw effectively can be fun:  there is satisfaction and enjoyment in handing a big powerful tool well.  But it’s nearly impossible to kill your best friend showing him your new truck or your new chainsaw, and it can be damn easy to kill your best friend carelessly showing him your new gun.  So guns require even more respect and care than the other things we normally consider too dangerous to handle if you’re tired or tipsy.  The people with a sense of humor about their guns are those I’d expect to bring a six-pack of beer to the outdoor range.

Also this:

What most of these shooting range and even the NRA yahoos (military types excepted) don’t understand is that if you’re about to confront someone with a firearm, it had better be loaded, you’d better to be prepared to shoot, and you’d better be prepared to take the consequences of that action.

I told my own stepdaughter, when I was teaching her to shoot, that the most dangerous thing in the world is an “unloaded” gun.

I agree with Elmo’s post above. If you want to have a “sense of humor” about shooting something that looks like a real person, buy an FPS video game.

Seraph, that’s always been my pet peeve whenever somebody claims that Democrats want bigger government but Republicans don’t, and that Democrats want a nanny state and Republicans want personal responsibility.  Republicans DO want the government to interfere in your personal life—they just aim their sights in a different direction than Democrats do.  The idea that government shrank under the Bush regime is laughable.

Libertarian:

The gun registry, which was a bad idea for a variety of reasons, has failed miserably here in Canada and so the latest conservative minority government has declared an amnesty on unregistered firearms while trying to repeal the original act. (I’m against the registry and for the amnesty.)

Despite certain restrictions, there are lots of guns here – especially rifles and shotguns.

People do kill each other with firearms here, including handguns, but the rate is far lower– 25% of murders in Canada versus 39% in the States. Of course, the per capita murder rate is about a fourth of what the US experiences.

We have food coops, gun clubs, community gardens, and all kinds of other organizations the likes of which flourish during economic instability. We have pacifist survivalists who live of the land, and also their rarer, crazier militia-man cousins who stock up on weapons and food in case of societal collapse – and these latter types, of course, often fancy themselves as being successful warriors in a post apocalyptic wasteland.

I’ve met enough of them to know they’re not interested in preserving society. They’re interested in watching the world burn, and then later in rebuilding society to fit their own warped conception of what a successful community would look like.

And that, Libertarian, is one big difference between responsible gun owners and frothing gun nuts. The latter cache weapons as part of their plan to terrorize fellow citizens into compliance if things were ever to go wrong enough that they accumulate any sort of real power. And a few of them would even like to orchestrate such a collapse.

In other words, those are potential terrorists – and not because “the liberals” painted them thus, but because of their own motives and conduct.

Sigh.  Nobody loves a lesbian with a gun collection.

Kiddin’ me?  Everybody loves a lesbian with a gun collection!

I know a gun store owner who is, even now as we speak, writing the Pope about cannonizing Obama.  Business is up about a zillion %.

Just to be clear.  I did not say Obama.  I said Osama.

You also said “Hillary Clinton”, wankstain. Last I checked she didn’t engineer the 9/11 attacks.

Honestly—there’s not even that many comments on the thread. It’s not hard to find out what you said.

Libertarian, you also said that Hillary is a favorite target at these ranges.  So if I were to bring in a big photo of Condoleeza Rice and started shooting at it, these very same gun enthusiasts would think that’s hi-larious, right?

I didn’t really need to be reminded.  I clarified Obama, because Gracchus mentioned him in response to me. 

If you hate Hillary, or Bush (as so many of you do), why would it shock you so much to put a picture up and shoot at it?  Many on this and other sites frequently wish pain and death on Bush, Cheney and others.  How different is shooting a picture.  If it gives you pleasure to shoot at a picture of Rice, to ahead.  Who cares?  Amazingly enough, you wouldn’t be hurting anyone.

And Advocate.  You missed my point.  Not only gun nuts, but normal people are concerned about losing their rights and are buying more weapons and ammunition.

Get a sense of humor.  One of the things you notice a shooting ranges is that people are having fun. Yes, it’s a fun activity.

Yes, it’s so fucking funny that male gun owners* put up pictures of Hillary Clinton to shoot at.  Eat my shit.

*And, yes, I’m making an assumption.  Prove me wrong.

If you hate Hillary, or Bush (as so many of you do), why would it shock you so much to put a picture up and shoot at it?

Because fantasizing about the violent death of others is FUCKED UP. I hate GWB, hate him like I hate Hitler and Osama bin Laden and Pol Pot. But I want him TRIED IN A COURT OF LAW, just like I wanted all of them tried in a court of law. Because that’s justice. Vigilantism is just the last refuge of violent, impotent populaces or pure wankstain scoundrels.

The mind boggles at someone who seems physically incapable of imagining a negative emotion that does not lead to violence. Fuck me, this country is full of lunatics.

The Canadian example is interesting from another angle, one which concerns gun owners in the USA and, I must be fair, they may have something to be concerned about: restrictions by the back door.  Shakesville had a thread on such matters and I said what I had to say there:

What will be interesting to see is whether or not jurisdictions who want to enact stricter handgun control will adopt the unofficial Canadian model: to surround the ownership of private handguns with such a web of forms, fees, regulations and bureaucratic inefficiency (some perhaps deliberate) that many gunowners will just say, “ah, to hell with it” and give up on it.

Let me give you an example. At our old law firm our paralegal was a gun collector and firearms instructor. He had to fill in some forms for each of his handguns, and have each notarized. At that time he had about a dozen guns. If he had had to pay for notarization he would have had to spend hundreds of dollars just to keep his legal paperwork in order. He didn’t because we did it for him for free. Then the government “lost” his paperwork, and he had to do it all over again. Then they “lost” his paperwork again, and the process had to be repeated for a third time. His circle of gun-owners reported similar “misplaced paperwork” in a very large number of cases. A later neighbour of mine ended up taking early retirement and selling his gun shop because of such problems and petty police harassment. One Bright Young Spark cobbled together a series of bullshit criminal charges which were thrown out of court, but the point had been made and the gunshop owner got rid of all of his guns because he couldn’t guarantee that the local cops wouldn’t be back for Round Two of Bullshit Theatre.

I’m not a fan of private ownership of handguns; I’m comfortable with a ban and really savage penalties for hoodlums caught using them. But I’m also not a fan of the stealth laws which de facto ban things through governmental duplicity rather than overt legislation.

One thing that the gunowners do have a point about is this: cops are often the laziest fuckers on the planet. They like easy wins and they like to drive up their stats. Finding an illegal gun being passed from hand to hand is hard. Nailing Joe Accountant or Jane Engineer for failing to dot all the i’s on their forms or storage is easy. Moreover, law-abiding people facing criminal charges for the first time are often the most confused and frightened people on the planet and cop pleas when they shouldn’t. Members of the lawbreaking class are less troubled.

It seems to me that the next step for (legitimate) American law enforcement is to shift its target and resources to one of the most glaring and loathsome gaps in the system: the arms companies and the related independent dealers who are the enablers of the flow of easily-obtained guns into the illegal market. If the Supremes have said that an American can have a gun in his home, fine. That’s the law now. I think it’s stupid law but it’s not my country. But that right of possession does NOT translate into a right to sell cheap guns in large numbers to what has been established to be a thriving underground market. Amongst other things a lot of those guns end up on our streets, and there is no Second Amendment right to arm criminals or smuggle cheap guns into Canada.

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/06/my-precious-precious-gun.html

Good Lord!

If free speech includes burning the American flag, why would anyone believe you don’t have the right to shoot pictures of politicians? They are public figures and they are certainly political.

As well, we do, indeed, have a right to own and possess guns as individuals. This was just affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States.

You want us all to respect Roe, but you’re unwilling to respect those rights you don’t like.

Pretty small of you.

Okay, that’s a violation of the stick rule.

Handguns and shotguns? Yes. Machine guns and bazookas? No.

How many deaths have been recorded by lawfully owned and registered machineguns and bazookas?

Indulging the notion of firearms as “fun” and a “hobby”—on a par with golf or fishing—sounds like sickness to me, or at best an appalling lack of appreciation of the lethal technology.

By all means, pursue serious firearms training and responsible ownership if you think you have good reason. 

Don’t misunderstand, I’m sure shooting can be fun. I’m saying that taking pleasure in the firearm—anything beyond enjoying the *knowledge* and *mastery* of your deadly holepunchers—is essentially vicious. Sort of the way some people really enjoy running over squirrels, or littering, or really violent, misogynist pornography. It’s kind of unseemly, no matter whether you’re ordinary or not.

If you hate Hillary, or Bush (as so many of you do), why would it shock you so much to put a picture up and shoot at it?

Because even though I have no respect for Bush, I don’t actually want him dead.  If I was wandering the backwoods of Crawford, TX, with a shotgun, and came upon him clearing brush, I might tell him exactly what I think of him, I might even spit in his face, but I damn sure wouldn’t even think of using that gun.

Because even though I have no respect for Bush, I don’t actually want dead.

Actually, for me, it’s because, even though I can make a lot of good jokes about the space shuttle challenger (I’m dating myself), some things aren’t worth joking about. Killing politicians in one. I’m not really into rape jokes or wife-beating jokes, either.

Punditus Maximus thinks that shooting pictures of politicians is horrible. How’s this any different than the accepted practice of hanging public figures in effigy?

Get a grip

If free speech includes burning the American flag, why would anyone believe you don’t have the right to shoot pictures of politicians?

I haven’t seen anyone here saying that nobody has the right to shoot at a picture of a politician.

What has been said is that it’s in poor taste and forbidden by quite a few shooting ranges.

If you want to tack a photo of Obama to a tin can on a fencepost in the woods behind your house and have at it, that’s your business.  I might think it indicates that you are a rather fucked up individual who I have no interested in interacting with (I might even think that your desire to do this could be indicative of a desire to actually harm a sitting President of the United States, though I probably wouldn’t alert the feds with no other evidence against you).  But I certainly don’t think doing so ought to be illegal in and of itself.

Some guys in another department of my company had a photo of Obama on a dartboard.  It creeped me the fuck out and made me think less of them as people.  I didn’t think it was particularly appropriate for the workplace, but I didn’t try to get them fired or brought in on federal charges or anything.

If free speech includes burning the American flag, why would anyone believe you don’t have the right to shoot pictures of politicians? They are public figures and they are certainly political.

You have a right to shoot pictures of politicians.  We have a right to think you’re a sick fuck for doing it.

See?  Everyone’s happy.

“If free speech includes burning the American flag, why would anyone believe you don’t have the right to shoot pictures of politicians? They are public figures and they are certainly political. “

Angst, I don’t think think that anyone here is arguing against the exercise of such a combination of First and Second Amendment rights.  They’re saying that you’re a sick and possibly dangerous fuck if you do.

Punditus Maximus thinks that shooting pictures of politicians is horrible. How’s this any different than the accepted practice of hanging public figures in effigy?

How many politicians have been assassinated via hanging in the United States?  And how many have been assassinated via gunshot?

They’re saying that you’re a sick and possibly dangerous fuck if you do.

Lessee…..I’m a sick fuck for defending a person’s right to make political speech by shooting images and you not a sick fuck for defending Roe which has resulted in the grisley murders of 40,000,000 babies?

That about it?

How’s this any different than the accepted practice of hanging public figures in effigy?

I’ve never hung anyone in effigy. Never met anyone (to my knowledge) who has.

However. Hanging someone in effigy is a political, group statement made rarely and almost always in response to a specific action on the part of the individual. It’s a form of solemn group protest. It’s engaged in as a group activity, as a serious and unique (as in one-time) event, and it is (rightly) understood that the act is a historical and symbolic method for expressing extreme disapproval - no one worries that President Bush will actually be hung to death when, say, he steps off a plane. Effigy burning is a means to get attention, to show a politician “we care deeply about this issue, but you will not pay attention to us any other way.” The goal is to CHANGE the politician’s actions, not to kill or destroy them.

Shooting pictures at politicians is, for the people you are describing, a weekly or monthly practice. It’s not a symbolic, historical-based protest - it’s a form of entertainment. At best, they feel that they are going to shot at something so why NOT shoot at someone they dislike or hate? At worst, it’s an embodiment of what they’d like to do but haven’t tried - yet. It’s not a serious intellectual engagement over a specific issue, like an invasion or a breach of human rights. It’s a childish whine. It has no symbolism or basis in history. It has no group significance, no “we gather here to burn your effigy because we are powerless to get your attention in any way”. It has no deeper meaning, other than hate and sickness. It’s not a political statement. And there are, yes, legitimate concerns that someone will try to shoot these politicians.

That is why you are sick for thinking that it’s a ‘fun’ practice. And, yes, you are within your rights to do so - did anyone say otherwise? No? So STFU.

(Update: Ah, we’re moving goalposts to Roe. *eyeroll* can we have ONE thread without invoking abortion? Just one? I call stick rule…)

Stick rule!

Essie:  Very, very well said.

I’m a liberal and I believe in the Second Amendment.  I just disagree with most libertarians in the interpretation.  For me the key words are well-regulated and militia.  So I have little problem with reasonable licensing and back-ground checks, waiting periods, etc.  Not to the extent that the Canadians have, but maybe more than what we currently have After all, we don’t just let anybody drive either.  And both the driver and the vehicle have to be licensed.

Ron O:  Minor quibble, but I don’t have to be licensed or register my vehicle as long as I only drive on my own property.

Pal, trying to change the subject ain’t a viable arguing mode.  You’re operating from a faith-based system which posits that fetuses are human beings.  Most folks here operate from a more-science based concept which sees them as tissue. 

Both notions are utterly beside the point at issue, which is this: if you put the face of somebody you hate on a target and pump bullets through it you’re a sick fuck, whatever your motivation.  Nobody’s arguing with your rightto do so, and for you to pose yourself as an action-figure hero “defending a person’s right to make political speech” is pretty much a textbook straw man argument.  There are lots of things that are legal that are just plain creepy and morally wrong and that’s one of them.  You don’t have to be acting unconstitutionally or illegally to be acting repugnantly.

The great thing is it really doesn’t matter what you think….it’s a guaranteed right of political speech just as hanging in effigy is protected.
[
The subject matter was the spike in gun sales. It’s millions and millions. There aren’t enough of the stereotypes trotted out to account for even a small fraction of these sales. These are working people who have watched the Democrats attempt to infringe on their right to keep and bear arms for a long time. And now that liberal Democrats are in control, it seems a rational act to buy now if you think you want one.

Count me in with the pro-gun liberals.  I’m a bit more expansive in my understanding of the second amendment than most liberals in that I think it protects the right to own arms up to and including fully equipped and operational aircraft carriers.  What it pretty clearly does not protect, selective quotation notwithstanding, is the right to keep and bear arms without any oversight whatsoever.  The word “regulated” didn’t get in there by accident.

Oh Christ - here we go again. Americans and guns.

I’m going to go lurk on an Iranian site.  They’re having a discussion about whether 12 year olds make good wives, or whether guys should wait until 13…

Lessee…..I’m a sick fuck for defending a person’s right to make political speech by shooting images…

You aren’t defending anything, since nobody here has argued that we ought to outlaw the practice of shooting at pictures of political figures.

...and you not a sick fuck for defending Roe which has resulted in the grisley murders of 40,000,000 babies?

No, it hasn’t. But by all means, please keep casting yourself in the role of the fiercely independent politico, boldly taking a stand for a person’s right to pretend they are shooting their elected leaders. The right wing needs all the make-believe heroes it can get.

And both the driver and the vehicle have to be licensed.

Registration of guns by the government is a dangerous practice. When Germany walked into Paris, they simply obtained the registry for all of the guns in the nations and then proceded to round them up leaving the French underground virtually unarmed.

There is a reason why we do not register most guns. The only ones we do register are fully automatic weapons, silencers, destructive devices (large calibre), etc. You can still own them.

http://www.classthreesupply.com/htbmachinegun.htm

Angst=No reading comprehension

Errrrr…..“Well Regulated” meant well supplied and working properly…..as in a well regulated army.

But Dr Sir I am Afraid it would blunt the keen edge they have at present which might be keept sharp for the Shawnese &c;: I am convinced it would be Attended by considerable desertions. And perhaps raise a Spirit of Discontent not easily Queld amongst the best regulated troops, but much more so amongst men unused to the Yoak of Military Discipline.
    —- Letter from Colonel William Fleming to Col. Adam Stephen, Oct 8, 1774, pp. 237-8. (Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774, Wisconsin historical society, pub. (1905))

One of the Seamen that had formerly made a Greenland Voyage for Whale-Fishing, told us that in that country he had seen very great Troops of those Sea-Horses ranging upon Land, sometimes three or four hundred in a Troop: Their great desire, he says, is to roost themselves on Land in the Warm Sun; and Whilst they sleep, they apppoint one to stand Centinel, and watch a certain time; and when that time’s expir’d, another takes his place of Watching, and the first Centinel goes to sleep, &c;. observing the strict Discipline, as a Body of <b>Well-regulated Troops<b>
    —- (Letters written from New-England, A. D. 1686. P. 47, John Dutton (1867))

...remember, the troll is just being trollish…disengage and allow nature to take its course…

Too right. Killfiled.

I wanted to address what atheist said…waaaaay upthread:

And if there are a lot of NRA types around you, it makes more sense to get a gun in order to deter those fuckers.

Ultimately, isn’t the logical conclusion of this way of thinking a kind of cold war mentality? As bad as the economy could get, do we really want NRA types and lefties stockpiling weapons to try and “deter” each other? Because that’s where the notion of deterrence leads, and that sounds like a recipe for disaster.

“Ron O:  Minor quibble, but I don’t have to be licensed or register my vehicle as long as I only drive on my own property.”

Elmo, if you put the car in drive instead of neutral does it, say, race out of your yard at 722.73 mph and go through the head of the kid three houses away? 

Yeah, I didn’t think that you thought that through.

Me: If you hate Hillary, or Bush (as so many of you do), why would it shock you so much to put a picture up and shoot at it?

The O: Because even though I have no respect for Bush, I don’t actually want him dead.  If I was wandering the backwoods of Crawford, TX, with a shotgun, and came upon him clearing brush, I might tell him exactly what I think of him, I might even spit in his face, but I damn sure wouldn’t even think of using that gun.

The Opoponax

Me:  Newsflash to The O - The people who shoot at pictures don’t really want the people dead either.  They are shooting at pictures.  In case you don’t know, shooting at a picture does not make the person dead.  Oy.  It’s no worse than the numerous statements made on this Blog wishing Bush, Cheney and others ill.  It’s an expressive form of speech really.

Incidentally, I’ll be the token straw-woman liberal and state that I am very anti-gun. I’m not going to state that we should out and out ban them, just that I’m grateful that I will never have to make that decision for our country. I myself refuse to own one.

Incidentally, my boss’ son just came back from a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan or something, I’m not sure about the specifics. Point is, he’s military, he’s been trained how to handle a gun, he KNOWS to check and double-check and triple-check if a gun is loaded. He took an “unloaded” gun to a friend’s house last month and shot off his own finger fooling around with it. Turns out it wasn’t unloaded. The finger is a nub now, and my boss is fairly sanguine about the whole thing and finds it pretty amusing. I guess you have to laugh rather than dwell on how much worse it could have been…

Anyone can feel free to shoot at targets with the president’s picture on them. It’s just that they’ll also need to have a talk with the Secret Service so they can make sure the shooter isn’t a terrorist. They’ll also need to put up with getting regular scrutiny for the rest of their life from law enforcement officials who’ll want to make sure the shooter isn’t a terrorist.

“Aww, that’s not fair! It drives potential presidential assassins and people who fantasize about presidential assassinations underground! It marginalizes us! We won’t be considered part of a sane society!”

Yes, funny how that works, isn’t it?

Seeker:  No thinking really involved, just pointing out that the analogy is badly flawed.  There are lots of good reasons to regulate firearms, even those that stay on people’s own property, but the truth is that we really don’t regulate vehicles in the way that people want to regulate firearms. 

The point is, let’s be sure that our arguments actually hold real water, and don’t just sound good on first reading, mmkay?

If you hate Hillary, or Bush (as so many of you do), why would it shock you so much to put a picture up and shoot at it?

As with flag-burning, it doesn’t shock so much as demonstrate a level of attention-starved immature fantasism that’s particularly disturbing to find in someone wielding a firearm. It’s even more disturbing when that person rambles on about defending American values (such as those demonstrated on Tuesday) as he puts up the target.

But shocking? No. One of the great features of the First Amendment is that it allows dangerous idiots and ignorami to self-identify for the benefit of the rest of us. For example, mouth-breathers who use quotations that clearly define “Well Regulated” as well-disciplined and well-trained (to military or paramilitary standards) to “prove” that such discipline and training should not be imposed in any way on those bearing arms.

It’s no worse than the numerous statements made on this Blog wishing Bush, Cheney and others ill.

Except those statements are criticisms rather than random threats of violence, and are usually supported by something more than “lookame, I kin pull a trigger.” For people who are more accustomed to thoughtful discourse of the kind the Framers aspired to once the Revolutionary War was over, that kind of expression is indeed worse.

I myself refuse to own one.

I think for a lot of people, “refusing” to own a gun is much like “refusing” to own a band-saw. Lots of us don’t hunt, and home invasion simply isn’t a very plausible worry for most of us.

Guns are one of those things that seems nice in theory, when it comes to self-protection, but in practice is about as useful as an earthquake safety kit in Chicago: odds are almost 100% you won’t need it, and if circumstances align themselves such that it might be useful, there will likely be other sources to make it redundant.

Granted, guns can be interesting, and target shooting can be fun, but circusmtances of life are that no one is shoving guns down our throat to place us in a position to “refuse” one. But that works in the other direction, too: people who like guns didn’t just trip over a gunshop or pick up a gun at Ikea along with their bookshelves and kitchen utensils: they have guns because they really like guns a lot. I’d appreciate you not trying to wax poetic about how your hobby and passtime is some kind of universal value of importance to everyone.

“odds are almost 100% you won’t need it,”

If that’s true for you, lucky you. Yours is not a universal.  Please don’t assume none of us will likely never need it.

When Germany walked into Paris, they simply obtained the registry for all of the guns in the nations and then proceded to round them up leaving the French underground virtually unarmed.

And who’s about to walk into Washington, D.C. and obtain the registry of all the guns in the United States?  What enemy nation is about to invade, conquer and occupy us?  Mexico?  China?

I, for one, welcome our new Uruguayan overlords…

Pssst…. Mnemosyne, this is a false analogy.  Also a red herring.  And quite possibly a Straw Man.

As the posters above have pointed out, you shouldn’t fall for the false argument.
I’m pretty sure you feel that hanging someone in effigy is also sick and wrong, so why offer an answer to his false comparison rather than the real question, “What kind of nut is sociopathic enough to imagine murdering a person over a dissagrement in policy?”

And who’s about to walk into Washington, D.C. and obtain the registry of all the guns in the United States?  What enemy nation is about to invade, conquer and occupy us?  Mexico?  China?

Come on, everyone knows it’s the U.N. Be prepared for resurgence of black helicopter sightings in “the heartland.”

The people who shoot at pictures don’t really want the people dead either.  They are shooting at pictures.  In case you don’t know, shooting at a picture does not make the person dead.  Oy.

Charles Manson talking about “helter skelter” and going out to live in the desert didn’t make anyone dead either.  At least not right away.  It’s when he decided that he needed to give the impending collapse a little help getting started that people died.  Nobody thought he was going to kill anyone either, until he did.  Yeah, we now know he’s a psycho, but until he actually killed someone we didn’t.

Banning guns is a non-starter in this country, but let’s not kid ourselves that there are no consequences to allowing private gun ownership.  There are going to be insane people and angry people and klutzy people that are going to kill other people with the guns they own, who they would not have killed had they not had the guns (not in the same way, at least).  That’s the “acceptable losses” we agree to take in exchange for the right to own guns.

So, the current claim is that R v. W has resulted in our population being 40 million people lower than it actually would have been without it?

*pictures roadway system of united states with an instant population growth of 40 million*

holy fuckin’ shit.

Ok…

Here’s what I think. Almost all gun owners are fucking nuts. Sick, sad, pathetic nuts. Protection from danger? Yeah, right, because breaking and entering is a crime dealt with by lethal force and there is a near zero level of people successfully using their guns to counter lethal threat without innocent bystanders and a hell of a lot of people killed by their own guns or by the guns of family members. Almost all school shootings have more to do with a family member with a gun collection “for protection” than with video games and all the other boogey-men we come up with to overcome our intensely pathological obsession with violence as a substitute for masculinity and patriotism or “rural authenticity”. I’m honestly sorry as many of you no doubt violently disagree, but yikes, the comments on this thread alone. The masculinity worship, the necessity to have intimate knowledge of weapons of death to be taken seriously, the casual eliminationist fantasies defended by some, and the ludicrous linus with his security blanket paranoia. Yeah, protection, firefights, civil collapse…yeah, if that happens, we’re generally fucked and it’ll be people raising community gardens and other feminine activities that’ll aid survival more than psycho raiders with penis-extension guns. The rest is idiocy promoted by movies. It’s inane and pathetic.

On that note, it’s obvious the problem is more the fear of the other, ignorance, and the social worship of anxious masculinity and the culture built around guns than guns themselves. Furthermore, it’s way too much work for not enough social benefit. We’d be far better off with a public campaign pointing out that gun owners are pathetic examples of masculinity and paranoid idiots than any stupid bans that’ll have the psychos looking for exceptions and using it as justification. So, nutsoes, on behalf of the “wussy” liberal brigade, keep the damn penis-substitutes. Honestly, we don’t want them and frankly we just don’t care enough anymore. But if you want something safer, try a dildo. It’s just as penisey and has the benefit of cutting out the middleman in getting you off, win-win.

I, for one, welcome our new Uruguayan overlords…

Someone owes me a new keyboard, and possibly a witty explaination I can offer my boss on why I was laughing so hard…

And ya, I second the thought that there’s a continuum of behaviours between saying you hate Bush and planning to assasinate him, but I think that putting his face on a target to shoot is a healthy step closer to the assassination side. Sure it’s “free speech”, but it’s also making a deliberate action. It’s not saying “man I hate that guy” it’s taking the time to print the picture and showing not only yourself but the audience around you how much you hate that guy (and it’s more disturbing still when you realize that they’re looking for adulation, and if they get enough, and are a damaged enough person, that they could decide to take a bigger step and become a hero to like minded idiots…)

gah, sinus infection + meds make me ramble. I hope that was coherent enough.

Oh and it really bears repeating considering many of the posts here:

Since when was breaking and entering a crime punishable with death?

At what exact moment did property have more rights than human beings?

Oh by the way, invasions for the purpose of homicide or rape have a near-zero occurrence so those examples are so much hornswaddle and also ignore the fact that we have rule-of-law in this country.

But that works in the other direction, too: people who like guns didn’t just trip over a gunshop or pick up a gun at Ikea along with their bookshelves and kitchen utensils: they have guns because they really like guns a lot.

Which takes me back to The West Wing episode where Sam Seaborn and Ainsley Hayes have this exact discussion, and Ainsley’s line about hating the people who like guns.  Yes, I do in general hate the people who like guns, because the same mindset that leads to them liking guns generally also means they oppose various other principles I hold to be critical to my conception of a good society, and I want America to be a good society as I see it.  I don’t see how we can have a good society when if I do something to piss you off or you just want my stuff and you have a gun, I’m getting shot.  World of Warcraft and Halo may be fun games but I don’t want to live inside them.  I’m not Master Chief material.

The people who shoot at pictures don’t really want the people dead either.  They are shooting at pictures.  In case you don’t know, shooting at a picture does not make the person dead.

Uhhh, sure.  But if it means nothing, why do it at all?

When I was in high school, Britney Spears was just coming onto the scene.  Some girls in my dorm pulled out one of her spreads in Seventeen or some similar magazine, taped it to a bathroom wall, and we defaced it.  We gave her a mustache and chest hair, stereotypical “tacky redneck” tattoos, drew in dialogue and thought bubbles to make her image say/think nasty things.  Because we hated her.  We wanted to demean her, to call her out as what we thought she really was.  If she’d been one of our schoolmates, we’d have heaped abuse on her, bullied her within an inch of her life. 

Was it “just a joke”?  Sure.  But it was a “joke” that we definitely meant.  We weren’t just bored, or trying some postmodern new artform.  We hated her and wanted to demean her in any way we could.  I would guess that the folks who throw darts at pictures Obama or shoot holes in pictures of Clinton feel an equal amount of very real, very serious, hatred.

Yes, I do in general hate the people who like guns, because the same mindset that leads to them liking guns generally also means they oppose various other principles I hold to be critical to my conception of a good society, and I want America to be a good society as I see it.  I don’t see how we can have a good society when if I do something to piss you off or you just want my stuff and you have a gun, I’m getting shot.

Liberalbob, did you miss the discussion in the thread between all us good liberals who also happen to own guns?  Jeepers, what is it about my gun collection that will also lead me to oppose economic justice, or abortion rights, or—even worse—decide that I will take your stuff by force, just because I can?

There are millions of gun owners in this country.  Why haven’t you been robbed and murdered yet?  Could it be because the vast, vast, overwhelmingly vast majority of them would no more shoot you than they would stab you or run you over with their cars?

@Mike

The correct answer is of course when the property were human beings (see slaves, indentured servants, women)

The correct answer is you don’t know the future. Anyone who breaks into your home while you’re there must be considered dangerous.

Lessee…..I’m a sick fuck for defending a person’s right to make political speech by shooting images and you not a sick fuck for defending Roe which has resulted in the grisley murders of 40,000,000 babies?

In other words, you have no defense because you realize on some level that I’m right, so your only choice is to attack on something totally unrelated.  Gotcha.

Though given the whole discussion about masculinity issues and pro-lifers going on in the other thread, I’m sensing more than a wee bit of insecurity here.

I’m pretty sure you feel that hanging someone in effigy is also sick and wrong, so why offer an answer to his false comparison rather than the real question, “What kind of nut is sociopathic enough to imagine murdering a person over a disagreement in policy?”

Hanging in effigy does seem different than target-shooting to me, actually, because 90 percent of the time that I see it, it’s happening in a protest or a parade.  If that’s where it happens, it’s clearly not just one person’s expression, so I don’t think it really fits the analogy.

The individuals who decide to hang people in effigy on their own are sick fucks, though.

The assumption is that a person who does a home invasion while the home is occupied is either A) intent on doing bodily harm to the occupants or, B) willing to do bodily harm to obtain their property.  Bodily harm including rape.  Rape being the principal reason that, at least in my state, the presumption is self-defense if the person is actually inside my home.  If I go outside my hope and see a person stealing stuff, I am not entitled to use deadly force.  Deadly force can only be used to protect yourself or others from physical harm.  Property is NEVER an allowable reason to use deadly force in any jurisdiction anywhere.  It is a mondo stupid argument.

Some of you might have missed the part above where I pointed out that the assumed home invasion with intent to harm is a near-zero event. Most home invasions are for the purpose of theft, most conflicts with homeowners occur because the assumption is that there was no one home. The point was that gun owners use the equivalent of a 24 ticking time bomb scenario to justify a fear-based purchase. The intruder (swarthily urban) coming in and despoiling the missus (white and virginal) are non-events and are not only based in promoting fear of (black) others, but also sexism in that the most common rapes occur from loved ones or trusted friends or invited guests.

It is interesting to note that when I pointed this out above, I did so specifically to address this non-reply to the “necessity” of guns. I also find it quite ironic considering how another favorite defense of guns is that women should have them to protect against battery and rape despite the fact that any form of resistance especially deadly resistance by a woman to an assault is nearly always prosecuted to the full extent even when its obviously an accident or in self-defense, like those for whom the gun was initially pointed at them and their kids with intent to use.

Another fun-fact. A boyfriend or husband with a gun for your protection is far more likely to use it as a means of abuse or rape at obscenely higher proportions than a home intruder will break into a home for the purpose of killing or raping someone which as we noted earlier is a near-zero event.

It’s a security blanket, I get that. Stop trying to defend it like its somehow noble or necessary. It is merely an advertisement of your insecurities and willingness to be more afraid of hollywood demons than real life concerns. Or if you need to, be proud, wear a sign that says “Yeah, Brown People scare the shit out of me.”

Some of you might have missed the part above where I pointed out that the assumed home invasion with intent to harm is a near-zero event.

Not me, I was just ignoring it because it was such obvious bullshit.

Cerberus-

You’ve posted on this (and other feminist) sites.  I generally agree with you.  But your comment:

Here’s what I think. Almost all gun owners are fucking nuts. Sick, sad, pathetic nuts.

You can just fuck right off.  I know you used the word “almost” but I will bet dollars to donuts that I have been around more gun owners then you, so I’d have a better idea of their percentage.  I also bet that with a few clicks around I can find the number of gun owners, divide by the number of gun crimes, and end up with a number less than 50%.  So, no, not “almost all”, not even “most” gun owners are fucking nuts.  Just like I won’t accept “but your not like MOST women” I sure as hell am not going to accept “but you’re not like MOST gun owners”.  I am not that much of an exception.

Gun owners get guns for a variety of reasons (surprise, surprise).  Some people (like me) like to go target shooting because it’s cheap, I get to hang out with my friends, it’s nice to see myself improve in a very tangible way, and I get to enjoy the outdoors.  Some gun owners like to hunt (which I also did, before I discovered the joys of sleeping in).  Some gun owners (like my friend PE) like guns because they like the history associated with them (most of his don’t even fire).  Some gun owners like guns because they feel that it will protect them (they’re more than likely wrong).  Some gun owners do confuse their weapon for their penis, but they are not the majority.  Even less like guns because they’re sociopaths.

On some level, I do believe that having guns is a very, very, very last resort to government oppression. 

I don’t understand this disconnect with the left.  If I thought anything about progressive politics it’s this: individual liberty.  We let people choose their partners, their clothes, their music, when and whether they’ll have kids.  We protect speech we find abhorent, stupid and immoral.  Why is this individual liberty something that the RIGHT has taken?  Why does it matter why someone likes to own guns, when we don’t ask why people like anything else?

PITOR, gun rights is no where near comparable to child brides.  Fuck you.

Oh, and finally:

We have no need to fear an invading army getting a hold of gun registry. But, I wouldn’t trust the US government not to take it from us later.

It matters I think because guns can be used to kill people.  Choices as to partners, clothes, music and spacing of children don’t.

So if an event is reported upon nearly 100% of the time and the most someone can do is a smattering of old news articles, most doing a retrospective follow-up of the trial proceedings, and these events are years apart and seldom, what does that say.

In fact, this actually demonstrates a large part of the problem, the real problem leading to gun violence. We are a culture wherein the unlikely is reported upon and fetishized as a real and present danger. Home-invasion murders, criminals who sue the owners of property they break into, serial killers, school shootings. Statistically these are near-zero events. You are more likely to be killed by terrorists than to be a victim of such events. However, each instance of these cases is played up strongly and often, whereas more likely events are ignored by media attention.

The problem is this fear and the paired solution of firearms. The same fear that drove support for torture. It is the perceived frequency of a near-impossible event such as the 24 ticking time bomb which then drives support for stupid or heinous action. Home invasion murders are near-zero events. On top of that, it is assumed that someone who suffers this event a) has a gun, b) is able to reach it before the person who only has random murder on his mind attacks, c) is able to aim and fire it at the intruder before said crazed murderer attacks, d) doesn’t in a panicked state miss or hit a loved one instead. Considering the absurd amount of gun owners in this country and the NRA’s need for gun-wielding “heroes” you would expect to hear of such an event if it happened and if it was a common event you would of course expect to hear about it from family members or friends it happened to. But one doesn’t, because it doesn’t happen.

This is the real face of it, panel 3. The absurd freak out of non-existent events to protect one against the feeling of impotence against a sometimes random and cruel world. And because the event will never actually come to pass, or at least is highly unlikely to, you can comfort yourself that it is only through the magic of the penis gun that drive the bad men away.

It in truth only reveals one as cowards.

The heroic guy with a gun lets insecure guys feel relevant without having to get off their ass. It’s like the classic Jack Bauer scenario where there’s two minutes left on the bomb ticker and OMG they have to find the bomb! Which never happens, same as the way torture never works. 

Wow, elmo, it happened once per million! OMG, that totally makes it all better! Moron.

Add me as another bleeding heart liberal who knows guns. No Freudian overtones to me, but fuck is it scary for me to see guys with those very same issues. Dude, get some fucking therapy. I know a guy who wishes his home would get burglarized so he could shoot some no-doubt (in his fantasies) dark-skinned intruder. Like a twenty-year-old VCR is worth someone’s life. But that’s a brown-skinned intruder, you know—-for some white men, their dusty shelves of John Wayne movies are worth other peoples’ lives.

Actually I’ll go and include the full link, as the artist comment he has is fairly germane to the discussion.

Actually Antigone, you misrepresent my position.

I am 100% behind your ownership of guns. I fully support your right to own guns. I merely and emphatically believe that your ownership of guns does not deserve respect. I would fight to the death for your right to carry guns, even if you only had them so you could fight your way through the alien mothership when they come back for the other half of your buttocks. I would also defend to the death your right (or more anyone’s right as again, this wouldn’t really apply to you) to say the most racist, sexist, vile things.

However, I believe that such things should be mocked and publicly. Gun ownership is often tied to racist fears and desperate anxious masculinity and cowardly fear of any others. There is a reason that gun ownership is seen as masculine, that liberals are pressured to “prove their cred” by having shot a gun for fun, that unlikely scenarios are seen as behind-every-corner terrors, and that violent, racist, and sexist groups nearly always have ties to the gun-nut culture. None of these have anything to do with guns. Guns are merely the chosen focal point of a culture of anxious masculinity and messages about the coming armageddon that will befall “high crime” areas invading “your small town”.

My message isn’t that they need to be banned or even legislated against. My point is that they need to be mocked mercilessly for needing a deadly weapon to feel “safe”, “have fun”, or “feel like a man”. Seriously, the people who play Halo just so they can tea-bag corpses are less pathetic than that.

Katherine-

I’ve always thought that justification was a bit weak.  It is possible to kill someone with a gun (if you know what you’re doing), but you can kill people with any number of things.  The idea that banning guns will make violent crimes, or even murder go down, hasn’t been proven true anywhere (much like the banning abortion makes unwanted pregnancies go down hasn’t proven true either).  Liberals, at the very least, should be able to go “well, this law is a bust”.

I sometimes do wonder if it is a rural/ urban thing.  Most liberals are from urban areas (at least, according to the lastest demographic research I’ve seen).  I’m going to venture a guess that the guns seen in city aren’t target-shooting-and-hunting variety as frequently as they are the cops-and-gang-violence variety, and this is why liberals (who are human as well) have these false association between guns and dangers.  It seems the liberals I know who were okay with guns have all come from fairly rural backgrounds (though this has not been universal).

I’m glad to see that you would not wish to interfere with my gun rights, but I still rather resent the idea that I"m a “pathetic gun nut”.  I’m not the one afraid of an inantimate object.

Or if you need to, be proud, wear a sign that says “Yeah, Brown People scare the shit out of me.”

Fuck that. You’re so off base here, it’s not funny. As an armed (white) liberal, it’s white people that scare the shit out of me.

Seriously, though… I know more than a couple of well-armed, liberal Jews who see gun ownership as an essential part of “Never again.” *shrug* There are lots of reasons for gun ownership, some tinged with paranoia, some not. Sometimes that paranoia even approaches the realm of justifiable.

Yes, that’s right. Because I believe guns are pathetic security blankets and masculinity compensation devices on par with SUVs, I am afraid.

Or to put it more pointedly, I must be a “wuss”, less of a man, or frightened by the representation of cheap power. This would prove my point about the guns being the compensator of anxious masculinity and a security blanket for existential or more ugly fears. Or rather the gun culture built around them is a factor of the culture of toxic masculinity (aspects of masculinity that are hostile to other cultures and the feminine).

I would agree that it is sad on a more sorrowful, less pathetic front that the rural community has used this culture of fear of the other and anxious masculinity as one of its core defining values. It only reinforces that worldview of tribalism and fearing the other and making it harder for value systems to find common ground. Especially on the issue, for instance, of universal poverty relief and arts and broadband expansion so that even rural people would have more to enjoy and bond over than gun culture. Such team-ups would also help tamper the virulence of anti-feminine-seeming-activities movements such as anti-women, anti-gay, anti-culture, and anti-education movements which have many of their origin roots in rural communities.

But anyways, I would stress that yes, we do agree on a number of issues and that I greatly appreciate your writings. I’m sorry for any anguish I am causing now.

Cerberus:

Or to put it more pointedly, I must be a “wuss”, less of a man, or frightened by the representation of cheap power. This would prove my point about the guns being the compensator of anxious masculinity and a security blanket for existential or more ugly fears.

Um, the only person here who has suggested that being afraid of guns might make you less of a man is you. What Antigone is suggesting is that you’re afraid of guns not because you have a small dick and get laughed at by hot girls, but rather because you pretty clearly don’t know what you’re talking about. The problem with having dogmatic opinions on subjects you don’t know anything about is that inevitably, the people who do know what they’re talking about will show up and make you look very, very stupid. If that’s a risk you’re willing to run, more power to you. I’m just saying that there’s a very good reason why I don’t write six-paragraph essays about auto maintenance.

Put it this way: making wildly dogmatic, stereotype-laden and grossly over-generalized proclamations that all gun owners are ipso facto terrible people is exactly the same as making wildly dogmatic, stereotype-laden and grossly over-generalized proclamations that all black people are stupid and lazy. Using the existence of bad people who own guns as the sole premise in your argument that all gun owners are bad people is pretty much they exact opposite of rationality. Accidental fallacy is accidental.

Moore killed the gun control movement with “Bowling for Columbine”. Not that it was a bad movie or anything like that, it just kinda missed the mark. It made clear that the problem with guns wasn’t the guns, but what the guns represented…which was pure fear of the other.

I’m not entirely sure Moore actually missed the mark he was aiming at there.  I rather think that, whatever he may have thought going into the project, Michael Moore came out of it sincerely believing that the high rate of gun violence in the US has less to do with the guns than the violence.  Certainly, as you noted, that’s how the movie works out.

Some gun owners (like my friend PE) like guns because they like the history associated with them (most of his don’t even fire).

Count me in as a possible future gun owner for this very reason. 

As someone with a strong interest in Western Colonialism in China and the Second Sino-Japanese War/WWII, I wouldn’t be adverse to owning a service rifle from that period (i.e. M-1 Garand, M1903 Springfield, Arisaka, Nambu, Hanyang, Mauser K-98, etc).

Cebrus:
What Dan said.

Or, to put it another way-

I am a FEMALE.  I am not worried about my masculinity, I have nothing to prove in that realm.  Guns have not a single, solitary thing with how tough I am (or am not).  I am a feminist.  I am not worried about your masculinity.  If you don’t like guns, that’s fine.  Most are loud, kick like a mother, and are dirty.  But, they are a tool.  There is nothing inherantly dangerous about them.  You are acting like they are going to jump up and shoot people.  They don’t.  I would love to have greater poverty-reduction here, and more arts programs.  But even if I lived in San Fransisco, I would still go to the gun range and shoot for no other reason than IT’S FUN.  This is not about security for me at all.  There is nothing underlying it.  It really just is because it’s fun.

exholt-

PE has a M-1 Garand and a Mauser.  He also has a Negan (that is most assuredly the wrong spelling) from 1945 Russia.  That one, surpringly, still works.  Very sweet gun; very honest.

Actually Dan, the people seemingly the most hostile are the gun defenders. You are attacking a straw man in your characterization, describing me as a) ignorant about the subject, b) afraid of guns, c) hostile to gun owners, d) believe gun-owners inherently violent. It is interesting the responses as they seem to have been well practiced during old debates defending against cultural sieges. I respect that as I’ve done the same thing before defending video games against criticism.

Let me restate this again. I don’t at all think gun owners are violent. Heck, even violent gun-owners aren’t all that violent. What they are is attracted to the trappings of violence, specifically because of a cultural idea that prefaces masculinity and therefore virtue with those said trappings.

I don’t even believe that gun owners are terrible people. They are instead pathetic (invoking pity), paranoid, and tribal. They serve and prop up an assumed culture that is understandable. The necessities of survival in small communities do involve some level of co-opt and identification and where failure to be seen as “one of us” or un-masculine is punished potentially fatally, the pressure is intensified. Still the whole exercise is born in anxious masculinity, in fact, the masculinity that would be born in a culture where it is exhibited more out of survival reflex than earnest expression.

It is exactly the sort of expression you’d see in a locale where as protected_static pointed out above, “sometimes the paranoia approaches the level of justifiable”. Where gun usage is tied to masculinity and that masculinity and sameness is closely judged by twitchy people with guns. I can comprehend the construction. Thus the problem needed is to address the anxious masculinity behind the construction. That which drives many of the psychological needs that make it necessary to own or shoot a gun rather than as a stupid little item of death that you can appreciate on its own terms.

In an example with tit-for-tat, gaming has been overrun with FPS gaming styles based entirely on rugged super-powered macho men who everyone adores and online combat often tinged with racial slurs and sexist epithets. These are filled with players who are pathetic, tragic victims of anxious masculinity who require not only an environment of violence and might makes right, but also the recognition that such a world makes one more masculine. Traversing such a world without being a douche requires recognizing that unfortunate reality of the world. It also requires not being trapped by it nor making excuses that you need to play another round of Slayer because otherwise your gamer tag will fall below your sisters in the ranking. It also doesn’t have the potential of killing someone in the hands of crazy person, but that’s neither here nor there.

What they are is attracted to the trappings of violence, specifically because of a cultural idea that prefaces masculinity and therefore virtue with those said trappings.

Wrong again.  I’m sure there are some, but again, no where near the majority.

I was introduced to gun culture when I was 3.  It was a way to bond with my family.  Same for my husband.  Same for about 80% of my friends who shoot.

PE, as said already, was attracted due to the history.

My friend D was attracted when he discovered there was fuck-all to do in Grand Forks ND.

Of all the people I know who shoot, I know 2 who have any kind of paranoia about home protection (and one is because she was robbed, so I’m cutting her some slack until she gets over it).  We have other friends who don’t enjoy it, and we don’t pressure them to shoot.  We’re a pretty laid-back group,(even the conservative ones).

There is nothing about the GUN, or shooting, that has to do with masculinity issues, any more than rock or hip hop has to be misgynist.  You don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, as the case may be.

I enjoyed skeet shooting and occasional hunting, but I gave my shotgun away when I moved to Toronto.

Because you were FORCED TO to, and for no other reason. What ‘s weird is how easily you internalize the government’s need to control you when you’ve not been a problem.

At the very least, you should be pissed.

Angst, how do you know that?  It could be s/he just realized she wouldn’t use it a lot in Toronto.

Yes, I know you are female. The point was on a tribal identification (rural communities, identifying who is and who isn’t part of the “us”) based on anxious masculinity. That you needed to present credentials to be a part of one of the us in a counted sense of personhood through firearms is part of the point. That the activity is seen as the key locale of “fun” is a factor of that and of the fun of accessible power.

In fact, the accusation against the culture is most reflected in the value system of masculinity unquestioned. That is, that the masculine is the favored, naturally, that it can’t be attacked, and it can’t be rejected, nor can the feminine be appreciated. This is the baseline by which resistance can start. To be fair that’s a common problem everywhere, not just in the gun-culture and its surrounding area. In short, it’s seen as more of a survival skill to shoot a gun than garden, that it’s more natural for bonding fun to occur over guns than say a poetry reading. This is no more evident than in my critiques that the anxious masculinity is airs and stutters are immediately countered with the idea that a)I’m not masculine, b) I recognize guns are masculine, c) I therefore am seeking to improve my lack of masculinity by tearing down the more masculine activity. The answer is of course a)Yes, very much so, and proud of it, b)A false and stuttered presentation of masculinity, c)No.

And what will be most interesting is that I bet 90% of resistance to what I’ve been saying on this thread will cease now that I’ve admitted that I am not masculine. Because the gun culture is most of all, a frantic game of who is most masculine, who is presenting it the best and therefore has earned the right to be treated as serious.

The “liberals hate guns!” meme has always entertained me, if only because my gun-using boyfriend is leftist enough to come out the other side at communist.

<>It could be s/he just realized she wouldn’t use it a lot in Toronto. </i>

That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a while…

Everyone who believes that please stand on their heads…

Cerberus-

We also attend poetry readings (when available).  We can’t garden with no lawns.

I don’t see why you keep trying to force this analysis of masculinity on to an activity that is fairly nuetural.

I don’t care about your masculinity, or self-identification with such.  I do care about being referred to as “nuts” “paranoid” and “pathetic” and overly obsessed with my “tribal identity” when there is nothing to back that up, except for some stereotype you have about gun owners.

Angst-

Is there a law in Canada that I’m not familiar with that says you can’t have guns in the city?  If so, I’m sorry that I spoke out of turn.  If not, why is that so dumb?

I left most of my guns at home when I moved to college.  When my family lived in Charleston, we left our guns in storage in tiny-ass town ND because we knew we weren’t going to use them in Charleston.  There’s not exactly a lot of open space for target shooting in a city.

Antigone-

How is that not tribal identification? You were introduced to it at 3. It was necessary to bond with friends and family. It was a literal dividing line between them and us. The point is what the tribal identification is built on.

I’m sorry to belabor this idea, but really to hitch on to your counter example, this would be like if a hip-hop fan angrily denied the culture of masculinity that defined much of the popular rise and dominated much of the culture. It’s something that needs to faced down and examined in the light in order for transgressive tracks to pull-out of the reinforcing cycle and make their own trail.

More importantly, the culture is more like the main record companies themselves which reject reformation and is happy letting feminist hip hop stars do their thing as long as its known that the “real” artists, the ones making all the cash are the types to continue and expand the culture of anxious masculinity that becomes self-feeding and necessary.

Cerberus-

If you are trying to say that there are elements of misgynony in gun culture, I’m not going to say that there aren’t.  If you’re trying to say that it’s a cultural touchstone (much like the leefsa and the lutefisk) I’m not going to say it isn’t.  But that doesn’t mean it’s inherant to the culture.  The shooting itself is a completely nuetral act.  You wouldn’t say that hip-hop should just be abandoned because it has sexist people in it, why shooting?

I’d still disagree with you about A and B because there doesn’t seem to be a suitably compelling reason to ban them.  Like I mentioned up thread, there has been 0 evidence that banning guns makes violent crime go down one iota.  In London, it’s gone up.  Plus, gun bans lead to even more ridiculous bans (like knives and swords).  Banning shit for no reason seems a little anti-liberal to me.

Cerberus:

Actually Dan, the people seemingly the most hostile are the gun defenders.

Yeah. Imagine that. You attack an entire group of people with nothing more than gross generalizations of a subject you know nothing about, and they have the temerity to be hostile to you? You, with your complete inability to be wrong about anything, ever?

Who would have ever imagined that would happen?

I don’t even believe that gun owners are terrible people. They are instead pathetic (invoking pity), paranoid, and tribal.

So in short, you’re A) ignorant of the subject, B) afraid of guns, C) hostile to gun owners and D) believe gun-owners inherently violent. Thanks for proving my point for me.

Frankly, your response to me makes me think you’re even more full of shit than I did before, as well as pathologically incapable of listening to anyone who clearly knows way more about the subject than you do. So unless you also enjoy being called out for hypocrisy, you should probably refrain from accusing others of attacking a strawman.

This is no more evident than in my critiques that the anxious masculinity is airs and stutters are immediately countered with the idea that a)I’m not masculine, b) I recognize guns are masculine, c) I therefore am seeking to improve my lack of masculinity by tearing down the more masculine activity.

Of course, out here in objective reality, Antigone in particular has gone to great lengths to reassure you that no, she is not attacking your masculinity or anyone else’s, she is attacking your ignorance and dogmatism.

But do you listen? No, not even for a second.

And what will be most interesting is that I bet 90% of resistance to what I’ve been saying on this thread will cease now that I’ve admitted that I am not masculine.

Like I said before, nobody is attacking you because they don’t think you’re masculine. In fact, nobody around here gives one good goddamn how big you think your dick is, or even how big it actually is. They’re attacking you because you’re a pompous, dogmatic asshole who lacks the self-awareness to realize that he doesn’t have the slightest fucking clue what he’s talking about.

It’s time for you to get over yourself. There’s nothing sadder than someone with ostensibly liberal opinions who nevertheless thinks and argues like a die-hard fascist.

Cerberus:

How is that not tribal identification? You were introduced to it at 3. It was necessary to bond with friends and family. It was a literal dividing line between them and us. The point is what the tribal identification is built on.

Who fucking cares? You can say exactly the same thing about literally anything. Do you like the Lakers? Tribal identification. Hamburgers? Tribal identification. Cereal? Tribal identification. Computers? Tribal identification. Using a pen instead of a pencil? Tribal identification. Drinking out of a mug instead of a cup? Tribal identification.

Ridiculous argument is ridiculous.

My point is that it’s not neutral. My evidence are the comments on this thread and the assumptions they were based in. The necessity of gun-ownership, the stress on protection, need for guns for the sheer sake of protecting them from seizure from an ultra-powerful government unlikely to exist without support from gun-owners themselves, the association with in-depth knowledge of weaponry with rank and respect, the necessity to stress gun-ownership as an apologia to liberalism and as a defense of it, its tying to the act of survival itself, its need for the sake of protecting from rape from home-invading strangers, the assumption of malice in the form of hatred before assumption of pity or bafflement. These were the demonstrated responses even long before I entered in and called it a pathetic exercise in using a deadly weapon as a tribal security blanket.

Again, we have a fucked up global culture, a lot of things aren’t neutral, a lot of things carry baggage. The resistance to recognition even in rather obvious cases like the ones above wherein people tried to argue that the needing a gun against home invasion trope wasn’t rooted in deeply racist and faux militaristic worldviews. That guns have been tied to manliness and heroism and people want to play at that without risk in our culture is natural. Many video games and movies are based on that notion. The point is the mass resistance to recognition of that fact or to question any aspect of the culture at all. This last point is why I refer to it as tribal (it has grown into more of a necessary mark of who one is, that one came from rural stock, than an organic growth of alliances).

Cerberus:

These were the demonstrated responses even long before I entered in and called it a pathetic exercise in using a deadly weapon as a tribal security blanket.

So you entered a thread with your own personal axe to grind, and used literally everything that everyone said in the entire thread as proof that your personal grinding-axe is valid?

Conspiracy theorist is conspiratorial.

Again Dan, I don’t think gun owners are violent, I think they are cowards. When they are violent, it is often because they are being found out as cowards or afraid they will be revealed as cowards. It is as you say a relatively low occurrence, because they are fundamentally cowards. If they weren’t cowards, they wouldn’t need guns to feel safe or powerful. If they were inherently violent, they wouldn’t need guns to express it. Guns are a stored power anyone can use. When they are used for violent means they are often used without honor and against persons perceived as less powerful than they are (though violent fantasies always star ideas of more powerful people taken down by them). So no, I don’t think gun owners are violent.

pepito-

That’s incredibly racist bullshit.

It’s also a product of the split tribal identity of rural gun owners. Oh, rural us owners aren’t violent, it’s those damn inner city gangs. We just need our guns for when they come out here. Its that particular breed of stupidity that led to some of the tragedies post-Katrina where refugees from New Orleans were gunned down in some of the neighboring towns (not a fault of guns, but rather this particular culture that has been partially built around guns (it is the culture that is the problem))

Dan-

Fascist, big dick, etc… But yes, I’m deranged and unwilling to listen. Actually, I’ve got a better idea. Explain to me exactly how my opinions are reminiscent of the thoughts and opinions of a die-hard fascist.

Tribal identification. Yes, Lakers actually can work as a good example, though a better example might be something like the Celtics-Rangers rivalry and other one’s that are more likely to be life-long and life-held among fans. It is something you’re born with, where when growing up your association with one club or the other can dictate your circle of friends and the attitude of your family and interactions with them. With stupidity, they can lead to actual violence, and unexamined that it is at base, just a game, can lead to really stupid shit.

The others can definitely be tribal identities if they were so utilized and engendered the same dire loyalties that resisted any honest attempt at self-examination.

Cerberus-

I’m going to say this to you one last time, and quit talking to you unless I get an apology.  I am a gun owner.  Elmo is a gun owner.  Ginmar is a gun-owner.  Dan is a gun-owner.  We are all feminists, and I’m going to go out on a short limb and say commentors in good standing.  When you say shit like “gun owners are cowards” or “gun owners are paranoid” or “gun owners are wrapped up in masculinity issues”.  You are calling all of us cowards, paranoid, and anti-feminist.  That is needlessly insulting.  That can’t even be taken as a criticism because it is simply flat wrong. 

Carry on.

Part of the problem with the debate is that it’s so tied up in identity politics, so if urbanite me says “maybe we should require gun safety training courses in order to own guns” I’d suspect many liberal gun owners would think “huh, annoying and inconvenient that I have to do it, but I’ll pass it easily and hopefully it’ll increase overall gun safety”. And the NRA folks will react “librul gonna take mah gun away”.

Sounds about right.  It follows from my experience, only there is actual evidence that gun training courses do improve gun safety.

Antigone-

Sorry, answering multiple people and finishing a final at the same time. So, sorry for the delay. Actually, that was basically what I was trying to elicit. I was trying to point out the sexism and tribalism that infect the culture and that it is necessary to confront those. Basically we’re in agreement there.

I suppose where I am personally failing here is that I’m unable to convince any gun owners here that I have no interest whatsoever in ending, curtailing, impeding, impairing, or restricting anyone’s gun accesses, gun shooting, gun bonding, or even really dangerous drunken loaded gun juggling. And I think that may be the main place where we are cross-chattering. I suspect it may be because of the stereotypical liberal or certainly the public face of the anti-gun movement, that is one of wanting to take the guns away because they are too ignorant to understand them or how they are usually used (that is without mass killings).

In general, it’s much like drag racing. Stupid, potentially dangerous, potentially great fun and generally practiced more or less safely though accidents and incredibly stupid decisions can be made that cast the whole thing in a “ban them immediately” light. I can understand the defensiveness especially when I enter immediately with zero respect.

Or less dangerous metaphor, they are a lot like frats. Given a weighty kingly title by its adherents, often rooted in unenviable activities, and occasionally highlighted in legal trouble.

I wouldn’t want to ban frats or guns or otherwise limit them. I would however like to poke hole in their more dangerous culture aspects by mocking them mercilessly. If this means they are replaced with frats that uphold the humanity of women and gun-owners who recognize them as a dangerous source of historical connection or sober fun and bonding exercises, hooray. Just as I’d like to see feminist hip-hop replace the record stranglehold on the more anxious masculinity stuff.

The problem as you and I quite probably agree isn’t guns, it’s anxious masculinity and overly exclusive us vs them structures. These need to be confronted and overall mocked.

Perhaps since I’m missing the mark by a great deal, you could give me a few pointers on how I can target out the problematic culture in my mockeries from the activities themselves and how they are re-interpreted as in fact the very thing we both seek in the culture as a whole.

Or rather, since you are not my personal slave to do my dirty work for me, let me try again.

Guns do not have to be wrapped in a culture of anxious masculinity. You do not need them as a penis-substitute, if you use it for protection, you are a coward. Instead accept them for what they are. Dangerous toys, much like a fancy automobile, but actually affordable. Instead of worrying about the quantity or whether its close enough to your bedside table to fight off the Joker, just enjoy it for what it is. P.S. I do not mean by toy that I think its something you take lightly. You fully recognize the potential it carries and also that that potential doesn’t mean anything about you other than stressing the necessities of sober caution in handling it.

That was actually meant without snark though I don’t know if I fully pulled it off.

Antigone-

You’re right. I’m sorry.

pepito-

Also sorry. And I would agree.

@Antigone’s response to pepito-

That was all I was trying to say. That the culture of identity politics surrounding the gun culture has grown cancerous.

Furthermore, I recognize that my main problem was my intense lack of qualifiers owing to the fact that it’s rather late where I am currently (Denmark). All gun owners are not the cowards, gun owners wrapped in the culture and specifically those who purchase guns for protection or for strength are cowards and people who use guns for violence (and in fact most people in general who use violence in the day-to-day (not in war zones or other areas where violence is necessary to survival) are). The people up-thread saying how they needed guns to fight off home invasion rapists are cowards and people who buy guns to stave off anxious masculinity are cowards scared that they’re projection of masculinity will be found out and that some punishment will be met upon them for it.

In fact, this would seem to point out how such attitudes become necessities. And as you pointed out, this attitude is unfortunate in its pervasiveness in modern gun culture but is as you point out, unnecessary.

Cerberus:

Again Dan, I don’t think gun owners are violent, I think they are cowards.

Sure. Hating gun owners because you think they’re all emotionally weaker than you is so much better and more moral and less wackadoo than hating them because you’re afraid of getting randomly shot.

When they are violent, it is often because they are being found out as cowards or afraid they will be revealed as cowards. It is as you say a relatively low occurrence, because they are fundamentally cowards.

And you know this…how?

Sorry, but that ain’t proof coming out of your ass.

Also, if you can’t even keep something as simple as who said what straight (this isn’t the first time in the thread you’ve attributed a statement to the wrong person), I’m probably not going to have much faith in your ability to get anything else right, either, because it’s a clear sign that you’re not really paying much attention to what other people are saying to you.

If they weren’t cowards, they wouldn’t need guns to feel safe or powerful. If they were inherently violent, they wouldn’t need guns to express it. Guns are a stored power anyone can use. When they are used for violent means they are often used without honor and against persons perceived as less powerful than they are (though violent fantasies always star ideas of more powerful people taken down by them). So no, I don’t think gun owners are violent.

That’s funny, because every sentence in this paragraph prior to the last one is a fairly straightforward attempt to justify the contention that gun owners are violent.

Your self-contradictory assertions aren’t even slightly convincing, and of course we’re still left with your A) ignorance of the subject, B) fear of guns and C) hostility towards gun owners. You’ve already admitted to the last, and you might as well just go ahead and admit to the second. But to be frank, I don’t think you have the self-awareness to admit the first one.

Fascist, big dick, etc… But yes, I’m deranged and unwilling to listen. Actually, I’ve got a better idea. Explain to me exactly how my opinions are reminiscent of the thoughts and opinions of a die-hard fascist.

Had you bothered to read WHAT I ACTUALLY WROTE, instead of once again mindlessly lapping up the blatantly self-serving output of your pathologically vain little hindbrain, you might have learned that it doesn’t matter what your dumbass fucking opinions are if you lack the intellectual honesty and self-awareness to abandon them when they clearly don’t match up with reality, as evidenced by the people who demonstrably know more than you about the subject at hand (i.e., all of the people in this thread who are not you).

Where you resemble a fascist is in your insistence that your personal dogma, no matter how ignorant or self-serving it is, automatically and completely overrides the opinions of people who actually know something about the subject you’re maundering endlessly about. Your argument is based entirely on strawmen and stereotypes about things and people with which you clearly have precisely zero personal experience, and you react to anyone who objects to said strawmen and stereotypes as if they are actively promoting a nationwide prick-waving conspiracy, and is totally in on the horribleness of what you think is going on (but really isn’t).

In short, you’re not the sole voice of reason shouting from the wilderness. You’re not promoting higher ideals or moral purity. You’re just another gibbering narcissist with an axe to grind. The exact nature of your particular grinding-axe is largely irrelevant.

And actually, Antigone, I’m not a gun owner. I don’t like guns, and I doubt I’ll ever have one. I don’t even like using a gun on my World of Warcraft characters; I’d rather use a bow or a crossbow, because the sound effect is far less grating on the ear. But I also don’t like self-absorbed dogmatists, no matter where they lie on the political spectrum.

Cerberus-

Apology accepted, thank you.

Dan-

Sorry, I guess I must have confused with another poster.  My mistake.

“4) The people who believe that a gun in their home is less likely to kill a loved one than an intruder - in spite of all the evidence which says otherwise - is slightly deluded.”

Evidence which includes suicides and self-defense against a family member.  Anti-gun ownership statistics are notoriously, and in many cases deliberately, wonky.  Kind of like the “zomg teen pregnancy!” stats which include 18- and 19-year-olds but are used like they deal only with minors, or the “cops shot with own service pistol” stats which include suicides and accidental discharges resulting in injury.  If you’re trying to figure out how to reduce, say, the police problem, lumping everything together does not help.  Breaking it down is how you figure out where your prevention resources are best allocated, be it more/better mental health screening for active-duty officers, more intensive/frequent safety courses, or more high-tech safety mechanisms like the thumbprint locks.

PE has a M-1 Garand and a Mauser.  He also has a Negan (that is most assuredly the wrong spelling) from 1945 Russia.  That one, surpringly, still works.  Very sweet gun; very honest.

I think you mean a Moisin-Nagant.  Should actually include that model among possible choices I may consider getting as the Soviet Union did use them to fight Japan during the Soviet-Japanese border wars during 1938-1939 and when they stormed Manchuria in the waning days of WWII.  Some may have been supplied to the Chinese Communist guerillas as well….though supplies were limited as the Soviets had problems supplying service rifles to their own armed forces…especially after Nazi Germany launched its invasion in 1941.

Antigone:

Sorry, I guess I must have confused with another poster. My mistake.

No worries. I just wanted it to be perfectly clear that it wasn’t just gun owners, or even people who liked guns but didn’t actually own any, who were offended by rancid shit like “all gun owners are cowards.”

Dan-

I am not at all afraid of being randomly shot…which is odd, because that actually wouldn’t be a remote possibility given that I’m prone to being an outspoken activist who believes in confrontation politics. Especially while looking as I do. Meh.

Regarding dogma and asses. You assert in section 3 of your response that I characterize gun owners as violent. Leaving aside the fact that I never did once in my entire posting, though I said many other unflattering, downright insulting things that did yes tar with a wide brush further than even I intended and would have corrected with greater forethought…sorry, leaving aside that whole mess. You accuse me simultaneously in section 3 of asserting violent motives to gun owners, yet you criticize me mercilessly in section 2 for not having proof beyond my ass that the violence that does arise is more motivated by fear than hate and inherent violence. It is true that I was being charitable. It is quite possible that violence is something endemic in and of itself to the culture.

Or it could be that violent groups and subgroups often act much like other violent subgroups. Examining the methodology of many killings, we do not see equal targeting. Cases of violence, as seen in domestic violence statistics show that violence is often directed from stronger to weaker, hate crimes and other violent actions against specific groups target ones with little political recourse or who are politically unpopular. Few target armies or biker gangs. Often times, violence is enacted with greater numbers or greater firepower against an unarmed group. Serial killers, school shooters, and other darlings of the media get their infamy and recognition by attacking unarmed targets. The Columbine shooters were angry mostly at the Army for not getting in, they took it out on their school.

In further context, these events when they occur, often reflect the anxious masculinity in our culture. The Columbine shooters, the Virginia Tech shooters, the DC sniper, the Canadian feminist murderer, anti-choice terrorists, and the UU shooter all chose weak targets that were seen as feminine and reveled mostly in the masculine power of the fantasy as something that redeemed an otherwise unremarkable life.

In an effort to pay attention to what I write, I would urge you to pay attention that I never once attributed violence as something inherent to guns, but rather to a culture of toxic masculinity that has become unfortunately linked with the idea of gun culture. Certainly one cannot deny the fetishization of violence inherent in cultural depictions of guns as magical tools to defeat all bad guys as you and you alone prove how badass and unstoppable you are. This is sold as the fast-track to masculinity. It would thus stand to reason that those anxious about their masculinity or feel it under threat would feel the need to use guns as a quick fix and cling to the gun culture as confirmation of the delusion.

The aspect has not so much in common with guns as it does fundamentalist religion in that the dogma requires absolute loyalty in order for it to seem true enough to use it as a patch against fundamental doubts and worries.

Thus to Section 4 as I’ve already touched upon briefly, while I admit that my confrontation politics was too broad-brushed and thus indeed ignorant, the main point I was making was hardly ignorant, nor entirely based on lack of reasoning. I worked under a sociologist for a large part of my undergraduate on mortality research, the topic of why we kill or commit suicide was one he was asked frequently and loved discussing with people (so he was morbid, yeah). Add to that my own great personal research into feminism and how masculinity is constructed in society and it’s certainly true that I’ve well thought about the issue, though I’m by no means an expert.

Was I raised in rural gun culture myself? No. However, a large number of acquaintances were rural gun nuts and weapon-obsessed fundamentalist Christians. My SO’s extended family which is huge are all emotionally stunted “hunting” enthusiasts though I’d hardly damn hunting by their poor example as my grandfather personally raised me and used to literally hunt to put food on the table.

P.S.

The fact that I would need to outline this history to step up to the table was as you’ll no doubt remember, being far more intelligent and reasoned about listening to another’s argument, was a big point I stressed even back in my broad-brush comments as something heinous. The idea that only by personal contact with guns, does one become a serious speaker was part of what I pointed out about sexist aspects expressed in gun culture. In fact, it is very similar to how my SO is not allowed to be a part of serious conversations despite being the most educated person in her family (literally educated but also smart too) because only men can be serious people worthy of being listened to. In that same way, entering into the man-pursuit of gun talk by virtue of personal experience, is the only way one can possibly speak with any authority on the subject or even related subjects because one must prove your in the club to be listened to.

At the risk of being rude, this fits more your idea of my behavior and attitude than it does mine. I’d ask what axe you personally think I’m grinding or why I am a gibbering narcissist for trying to confront the sexist assumptions in the gun culture that was represented upthread (which not every gun-owner ascribed to) especially in the roles of conversation in which gun-people assert and non-gun-people back down. My point in pointing out the problematic nature of these roles and the assumption that it is the city-slicker non-gun-user who is ignorant, effete, and needing of most introspection and surrender is and the other masculinity-obsessed behaviors up-thread and in the culture only succeed in cementing the divide and the unstated issues that prevent gun owners from combating the really dangerous aspect of gun culture, anxious toxic masculinity and its need to be raised as paramount and uncriticizable.

And I was indeed in error earlier on, but there is a problem that gun owners and gun defenders think the other side will back down because of an implicit threat of violence. That you will or else has nothing to do with gun’s inherent necessity for person-person violence, but rather is a stern reflection of the only argument I’ve been having, toxic, anxious masculinity and its use to prop up and enforce a system of stratification and division.

But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not actually sure who you’re arguing with.

Exholt-

Yep, that’s exactly what I meant.

The idea that only by personal contact with guns, does one become a serious speaker was part of what I pointed out about sexist aspects expressed in gun culture.

This is treading a bit to close to the “all opinions on all topics” are of equal weight and worth mentality common in some quarters….which should be disconcerting if Joe the Plumber’s opinions on the Gaza crisis or many other topics for that matter is any indication…....

For instance, most people I know who need help with computers would be more inclined to ask someone who has had experience with using them rather than someone who hasn’t.* 

By the same token, if I wanted to be educated/informed on an aspect of Korean society and culture, I’d be far more inclined to trust the word of someone who happens to be Korean, someone who has spent much meaningful** time in Korea, or someone who has spent much time and effort seriously** studying/researching Korea than someone who hasn’t done any of those things. 

* At one job…worked my department ended up hiring and firing an individual within a workweek because we found he lied on his resume about being an expert Java programmer.  A problem when we found he knew NOTHING about writing any computer programs…much less Java.

** Not cocooning themselves in their respective expat community/compound and thus…not interacting meaningfully with the society in question…..or as a student…merely going through the motions without actually attempting to learn and understand the society being study/researched.

Going by the comments in this thread, what people are arguing with you about, Cerberus, is your assertion is that there is one and only one reason for anyone to own and/or like guns and that’s because they’re insecure cowards.  You keep repeating it as if that makes it more correct, and treat with contempt anyone else’s reasons for owning and shooting guns.  You derided Antigone’s childhood experiences with shooting as though there were something wrong with doing things you liked with other members of her family who also liked doing them.  Why do you think anyone would respond positively to that?

Put me down as another liberal feminist who likes guns.  And knives, and spears, and swords, and all manner of weapons.  I’ve owned guns.  One of my very few life goals is to get to put a few dozen rounds through an M2 .50 caliber machine gun; it makes a wonderful noise.  Home- and self-defense were never my reasons for liking to keep weapons around.

This may or may not be all that relevant, but I have actually been shot and I know exactly how much it sucks and how painful it is and what the recovery time is like.  (It gives me something else to yell at TV and movie writers about, yay!)  I shot myself, in fact.  But see, the thing that was going on there was that I was crazy at the time and hurting myself in lots of different ways—what made the real difference is the presence of the crazy, not the presence of the gun.  All that did was add another way of hurting myself to the menu.

It might have changed since, but it tickled the hell out of me that in the late 90’s it was easier to get a concealed-carry permit in Washington state than it was in Texas.

If and when I decide to start shooting again, I can buy another one. Really. Even in Canada.

At the whim of the federal government….and you must register yourself kinda like a criminal does when released. You have little gun rights in Canada.

<i>it was easier to get a concealed-carry permit in Washington state than it was in Texas.<.i>

Texas has the most stringent requirements of all ‘shall issue’ states. That’s why all other ‘shall issue’ states seek reciprocity with Texas.

what was the actual time when this place flipped over to registration only?

cuz, um, i did NOT post the above. it’s a fine post in all other respects. i really hope it was before the registration flip. otherwise i wanna know how someone hacked me

Cerberus:

The idea that only by personal contact with guns, does one become a serious speaker was part of what I pointed out about sexist aspects expressed in gun culture.

Actually, the idea that only by having personal contact with your object of study can you become a serious speaker about that object is pretty much the basic foundation of any kind of worthwhile sociological study. Any jackhole can read a book about something he or she has never experienced. Hell, read a hundred of them. But don’t even for a second think that that in and of itself makes you qualified to speak about it, especially not to people who do have direct personal experience.

In fact, it is very similar to how my SO is not allowed to be a part of serious conversations despite being the most educated person in her family (literally educated but also smart too) because only men can be serious people worthy of being listened to.

Actually, it’s nothing like that at all. Being left out of a conversation because you’re a woman isn’t even close to being the same thing as being left out of a conversation because you don’t really know all that much about the subject being discussed.

In that same way, entering into the man-pursuit of gun talk by virtue of personal experience, is the only way one can possibly speak with any authority on the subject or even related subjects because one must prove your in the club to be listened to.

Actually, that’s pretty much the way that all organized intellectual pursuits work. They don’t let any schmuck come in off the street and give a paper at the American Musicological Society conference, either, but I sincerely doubt that you’d accuse that organization of promoting systemic misogyny based on that alone.

At the risk of being rude, this fits more your idea of my behavior and attitude than it does mine. I’d ask what axe you personally think I’m grinding or why I am a gibbering narcissist for trying to confront the sexist assumptions in the gun culture that was represented upthread (which not every gun-owner ascribed to) especially in the roles of conversation in which gun-people assert and non-gun-people back down.

It’s not rude. It’s just a blatant strawman. Nobody is arguing with you in a symbolic effort to slap you in the face with their metaphorical penis. They’re arguing with you because you made grandiose and wildly incorrect accusations about a group of people with whom you admittedly have almost no direct personal experience.

People are arguing with you because you seem to believe that there’s an inherent doubleplus-secret difference between arguing that all gun owners are misogynistic cowards and arguing that all black people are stupid and lazy.

My point in pointing out the problematic nature of these roles and the assumption that it is the city-slicker non-gun-user who is ignorant, effete, and needing of most introspection and surrender is and the other masculinity-obsessed behaviors up-thread and in the culture only succeed in cementing the divide and the unstated issues that prevent gun owners from combating the really dangerous aspect of gun culture, anxious toxic masculinity and its need to be raised as paramount and uncriticizable.

And I was indeed in error earlier on, but there is a problem that gun owners and gun defenders think the other side will back down because of an implicit threat of violence. That you will or else has nothing to do with gun’s inherent necessity for person-person violence, but rather is a stern reflection of the only argument I’ve been having, toxic, anxious masculinity and its use to prop up and enforce a system of stratification and division.

You keep repeating — almost verbatim, in fact — this contention that many people in this thread are just calling you a flouncy little lady-boy and threatening to beat you up. You also really seem to want to believe that that’s the extent of the criticism you’ve received. But I have yet to see you quote anyone actually doing so, or even implying it. In fact, I’ve yet to see you even once quote anything at all, which at times can carry the rather strong suggestion that you’re only here to see yourself post, rather than to respond meaningfully to anything that anyone else has actually said.

But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not actually sure who you’re arguing with.

The uncertainty must be killing you. I think you ought to do what it appears you do for everything else: make an uninformed, self-serving decision about who I’m arguing with, then categorically refuse to change it no matter what.

Hello.

I am a black, pro-choice, gay marriage supporting, gun owning atheist. But one thing I refuse to call myself is a “liberal”, especially after reading some of the above comments.

It’s ridiculous that guns are even a topic of discussion in this day and age. Especially considering gun control has proven itself be a monumental failure when it comes to fighting crime. Like most idealistic social programs, it does nothing but waste money.

A gun is an inanimate object. Powerful and deadly, yes, but inanimate. Guns are not the problem. It’s the person on the other side that is a problem. Instead of gun control, let’s try criminal control. As much as i’d like to dispose of violent criminals, a more politically correct method of criminal control is locking them up forever or at least until their arthritis renders them non-threatening to the rest of society. I think that would work much better than our current system of “catch and release” that puts known dangerous criminals back on the street to continue committing crimes.

Some of the “pro-gun” arguments in the comments are flawed. I noticed a theme of “I support gun ownership, but I also support <insert some gun control scam here>...” One pro-gun person mentioned waiting periods. A reasonable waiting period would be useless as the average “time-to-crime” (the time between when a gun is purchased to the time it used in a crime) for a gun is approximately 1 year . So unless that waiting period is going to be 12 months or longer, it will have no impact on crime. Someone buying a gun and using it that same day or even that same month to commit a crime is simply something that doesn’t happen that often.

Licensing will also have little effect on crime as it works on the assumption that the majority of those committing crimes would be somehow inconvenienced by not having a license. It’s essentially an attempt to make a criminal out of someone who is more than likely already a criminal. If they didn’t bother to legally purchase a gun and they are already prohibited from owning a firearm in the first place, what will licensing accomplish? Nothing.

Some might say licensing will ensure that gun owners are properly trained, thus reducing the number of accidents. We currently license people who operate motor vehicles, yet the fatality rate of automobiles is nearly 4 times that of firearms. (~40k automobile deaths per 60 million autos vs ~30k gun deaths per 220 million firearms)

As for gun registration, history has shown us the result of that. Every government that has registered weapons has eventually taken them away. From Nazi Germany all the way to modern day Canada, gun registration has always led to a government agent knocking on someone’s door and saying, “We’re here to take your gun because we just passed such and such law making it illegal to have that gun.”

As for the anti-gun arguments, they are irrelevant, just as the christian’s argument against gay marriage is irrelevant. The reality is no one has the right to interfere in someone elses private affairs. As long as my gun isn’t hurting you or any other non-consenting person , no one can tell me that I need to be licensed, registered, regulated, banned, etc.

I encourage everyone on both sides to go learn the facts. http://www.learnaboutguns.com/ Many of them will surprise you. For example, guns are used in self-defense anywhere between 80,000 to 2 million times per year (depending on whether you trust the FBI or independent studies), often times without a shot even being fired.

And one more thing. Someone asked since when was breaking and entering a crime punishable with death… My answer: Since my state became a Castle Doctrine state.

But I have a challenge for those who have a problem with that: Would you be willing to put a sign in front of your house that states that you are unarmed?