>From: kelley <kwalker2 at gte.net>
>none of them have been super macho freaks. in fact, the ones i was
>intimate with were gentle, sweet, non-violent types. not one had ever been
>in a physical fight. one was a big wrestling type build kinda guy. he
>wouldn't hurt a flee! he loved his guns.
-Barf. How about giving these worthies an archery set? That way they can -hone their hand-eye coordination *and* build upper-body strength, all -without without maintaining the public menace that gun ownership presents.
I have to side with Kelley on this one. I actually don't understand the visceral dislike many lefties have of people who own guns. I admit I also don't understand the weird attraction the gun folks have for their guns, but the anti-gun folks often seem to just mirror the same obsession -- and since I have far more of the anti-gun persuasion, their deviance is more disturbing to me personally.
In an ideal world, maybe it would have been better not to allow hundreds of millions of guns to flood our society. But it happened and the reality is that in practice, no form of gun control short of serious authoritarian door-to-door searches and get them back. So all the moderate forms of gun control we can talk about will have pretty marginal effects on crime and even on domestic killings.
And since, as the "gun nuts" note, countries like Switzerland are pretty armed to the teeth without the same pathologies as the US, it seems like the anti-gun obsession is just a liberal excuse to avoid looking at the real causes of murder, rape and violence in society. Poverty and economic inequality are far better explanations, along with social disruption and other anomie-causing harms. I would rather focus on those issues - which could unite a lot more folks I want to see working together - than worry about hand gun control politics which would have minimal substantive gains but have major political losses in alienating regular folks who happen to have a gun festish.
-- Nathan Newman