KNOXVILLE, Iowa — As Democrats have fled rural America — or rural America has fled Democrats — many of them, living in cities, are left without an understanding of rural culture and its core values. If it isn’t on abortion, our deepest cultural divide might be on guns. The guns issue also has a profound political dimension, reliably driving rural Americans into Republican arms.
You know, Democrats in cities understand gun culture just fine. Here, let me explain it to you:
There are hunters who like to hunt. There are hobby shooters who go to ranges. And then there are racist paranoiacs who drive around in vans covered in HITLERY stickers who can’t stop waving every single gun they own around, who eat Fox News and InfoWars for breakfast lunch and dinner, who can just never SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THEIR STUPID GUNS.
Those are three distinct groups, and when I, a city Democrat, was growing up, the first two laughed their asses off at the third and there was no major lobbying group to tell them to make common cause against the evil conspiracy of reasonable regulations on 5-year-olds owning M-16s or whatever it is milquetoast thing Democrats stand accused of these days.
If all people did with guns in “rural America” was hunt animals and protect their houses from horror-movie villains breaking in, that might not be every city Dem’s bag but it would be fine. You know why?
BECAUSE NOBODY WOULD HAVE TO HEAR ABOUT THE FUCKING GUNS THEN.
God almighty, I am right up to here with the guns right now, how much you love them and how sacred they are and your great-great-grandpappy who fought for slavery in the Confederacy and whatever else. I understand gun culture just fine and it bores the living shit out of me and the only reason I bother engaging with it at all is that lots of people are getting DEAD.
You know, for the past two years we’ve been hearing about how Republicans were so sick of having basic respect for others “shoved down their throats” that they had to vote in the current racist monster and his gang of ten-a-penny fascisti in the White House. They were so, so sick of political correctness that they had to burn the whole world down. Their dicks all fell off because women were writing words on the Internet and they had no choice but to yell LOCK HER UP and vote for Trump.
Political correctness and women voting having killed exactly nobody, I would then turn that deep understanding of others’ culture right back around and offer this.
You can have all the guns you want.
Provided you don’t shove them down everybody else’s throat all the time.
A.
Prior to 1977, the NRA was a patriotic civic organization that helped the government craft gun control legislation to keep military weapons and things like “Tommy guns” out of civilian hands.
In 1977, at the NRA’s national convention in Cleveland, a cabal of organized Second-Amendment absolutists staged a coup, and ousted the entire board and management structure of the association. It’s been a dishonest propaganda outfit ever since.
When I was a kid the NRA actually was a relatively sane sportsman’s organization which basically didn’t do anything more pernicious than educate for gun safety. God, I’m old.
You have to understand something. The year of the Waco cult debacle, a whole lot of folks quit the NRA over Wayne LaPierre’s “jackbooted thugs” description of ATF (whose agents the Waco cultists had just got done shooting to doll rags).
LaPierre has hunkered down and doubled up his hardcore rhetoric ever since.
Yeah… Few people like to admit that they don’t understand something that they’re discussing.
Types of Gun Folk – A Variety
Hunters – from those who hunt a few times a year to as often as possible to procure meat
Hobby shooters
– Long range
– Skeet + Trap
– Practical Pistol
– Target Pistol
– Western
– 2-Gun and 3-Gun
Regular people who keep guns for home defense
People who carry a pistol every day
Multidisciplinary self-defense students, who also practice fighting and/or emergency medicine and tend to not only carry daily but keep a rifle in their vehicle
Even with these groups, they aren’t exclusive of each other.
These groups have various levels of prepper mindset, and orthogonal to this is the plane of political belief (as if even a 2-D model could capture everything and everyone).
Then, there are the people you describe as the alternative to hunters and hobby shooters. Despite being surrounded by righties and hunters, knowing a few people (lefty and righty, religious and secular) who read from InfoWars or other fringe media sites, none of them are racist, and they wax eloquent regarding many things other than firearms, truthfully making little discussion about them.
Clearly, you are either getting emotional – and therefore irrational – when posing this point, or using it to divide, and it certainly speaks against your character, if not for it.
Please, google “reducio ad absurdum,” and, while you are at it, actually try to find primary sources against your arguments. This is best done by finding arguments and locating the source of their statistics. It is rewarding work.
You mention God, but if you were to read the scriptures you’d find that he’s not only totally cool with men being armed, but he acknowledges the need for them if even for the sake of deterrence.
Your experience with gun culture is probably as deep as my experience with Latin-American culture, which comes from me studying Spanish, dating some Latinas, and joining my university’s Salsa club. You’ve met some gun owners, but most of what you know is second-hand at best about the cultures. If this were false, you would present something rational.
Further, it wouldn’t bore you to the point of driving you mad. Be honest – you hate it without sound reason.
Further, I submit to you that Trump was never a real conservative, and that he is certainly willing to cede rights of all kinds from the People. After all, that is what tyrants do.
Hillary Clinton was crooked as well, and every Bernie supporter. If no one else, should certainly know this.
The National Rifle Association has long failed the interest of protecting the right to keep and bear arms, and they have their own brand of marketing and types of hardcore followers, as well as those who simply hope that they do the right political things, possibly participate in NRA-affiliated programs and groups, and/or are certified by them to be instructors. Their best area is firearms education, and they are [indirectly, through their umbrella of people and organizations, as well as through their own publications] the biggest force in educating new gun owners to shoot safely and well.
I submit to you that your life could be much better if you actually took some time to allow your political opposition to be humanized so that you realize that those you might call an enemy are simply coworkers of yours with a different point of view, seeking to make the world a better place, but with no intent to do it at your expense, while you certainly mean to change it at ours.
If you didn’t mean to change ours, you would not inflate to absurdity the gun ownership issue.
If we can have all the guns in your view, then I would like to thank you for that confession. Now, realize that we aren’t shoving them down people’s throats. We simply ask that we actually get to keep and bear (i.e. carry with us, loaded) arms, which implies being able to buy them once we become adults (at 18 years old), and that people don’t hate us like this.
Gun culture is diverse, but only a tiny portion consists of the irresponsible, the irate, the racists, and the obnoxious. Most of us are chill, everyday dudes who like guns just as we would like baseball. Please, try to actually understand that culture.
To close, I submit to you that both pro-gun and anti-gun people flee the high crime of cities, but while gun owners chase freedom in flyover states, the anti-gun citizens who move out with them bring the policies of those cities with them. If you don’t like a place, don’t make someone else’s home the same way. Further, do not claim to understand a culture in which you have never been immersed, and in which you have never participated. Be truthful.
realize that we aren’t shoving [guns] down people’s throats.
Yeah, those kids in Parkland and Sandy Hoook musta gone looking for it. Amirite?
It wasn’t that a violent death was imposed on them by someone whose continued access to military weapons you are, unbelievably, still defending.
Second Amendment extremists had a thirty-year window to prove that their claims of an absolute right to go armed is compatible with civil order. They utterly failed to police their own, just as bankers failed to police their own during the run up to the 2007/2008 financial crash. We counted on gun enthusiasts to be responsible, not just as individuals, but as a group, and we found through bitter experience that we cannot count on that. Most individuals gun owners are responsible; some are really not.
So society will have to impose controls to protect itself from the murderous damnfools and crazy people for whom you refuse to take responsibility, but whom you insist we must simply endure as the price of your privilege.
I’m a lifelong gun owner and hunter, a veteran of the Army, and I want all civilian ownership of semiautomatic rifles and pistols banned, and a civilian ban on any weapon with a removable magazine. lop And I want gun ownership to require liability insurance, just as car ownership does.
As I said, we gave you thirty years to do the right thing, and you doubled down on protecting murderers’ access to military weapons. That has to come to an end.
No one goes looking to be murdered.
I submit to you that if, suddenly, every “military” rifle were gathered up, a kid like this would get it done with what remained available – the highly civilian Ruger Mini-14 used by Breivik in Norway, a shotgun as was used in Washington D.C. NAVSEA Building 197, or pistols, which are as common in these events as, ironically, they are in non-mass murders that run rampant in cities with strict gun laws.
What’s an extremist? “Extreme” is relative.
Is an absolute truth an “extreme” truth?
The truth is that the right to self-defense is absolute, and therefore predicates individual procurement and employment of weapons.
I am not sure which 30-year window you reference, but I submit to you that civil order has existed throughout American history, with the exceptions of our civil war, the world’s greatest time of financial distress, and the days when Americans couldn’t legally get their drink on.
Gun owners can only police their own families and organizations, and even then we can only go so far. Family members have their own private thoughts that we can’t know, and the NRA has its own thing going on that, because of their by-laws, the members themselves, even all together, cannot change with votes in their elections. The NRA’s insanity is worthy of a Ph.D. thesis in something maddening.
Gun owners do not generally believe in a societal responsibility, which is why we talk about the individual right to arms and believe in punishing the offender, not the nation. At the end of the day, I, like many other, never even got to meet in passing these psychos. Cruz? I’ve ever seen his face or shoe lace before he was on the news. I cannot accept responsibility for him and will not be made to bear it. Now, as for my family and friends, yes, I bear some responsibility for them, because I am actually involved in their lives. To date, none of them are being irresponsible or
murderous, so why should I be punished?
Conveniently, many are lifelong gun owners, hunters, veterans, but that doesn’t make them right about anything. Ignorance runs deep in every cross-section of society. I grew up hunting and shooting, around my many veteran family members and their police friends, and I watched a bunch of military-trained men fail to efficiently zero a rifle, clear basic malfunctions, or articulate anything solid about ballistics. On the other hand, plenty of civilians actually make an intense study of the gun. These people, not the vets, not the lifelong hunters, and not the people who keep everything in a safe, are the ones who have a valid opinion, because they are the students, the post-secondarily educated, who aren’t stuck in the elementary. Thanks for your service in the service, but you are not serving your oath or your nation when you speak against the constitution you swore to defend and seek to infringe upon the rights protected thereby. I’m sorry that you, riding on your moral high horse, look down on the common citizen and call something so basic and inherent to lifeforms everywhere as a privilege. Go tell the gazelle.
The liability insurance issue will keep citizens from being able to own a weapon by making it impossible to afford, and, really, if someone wanted to and it were set up so that the average person could afford it, someone could simply go through the process and get that insurance, and then leave a trail of broken and dead bodies in their wake. It will only encumber those who would never abuse their weapons.
I do not want to protect the murderer’s rights, but rather the rights of those who haven’t murdered. What happened to the presumption of innocence until the culmination of a trial concludes otherwise?
You can want tyranny all you want. It is still wrong. Your view is extreme. If anything, we are in a nice, moderate place already. Yet, as long as people die, a segment of the population will keep pressing this issue, and when it is unsurprisingly not prevented, more will be demanded of people like me,
And for the record, I didn’t have thirty years as an adult so that I could do anything about policy, nor even thirty years at all so that I may correct anyone during that time.
If anything, the anti-gun side has had since 1934 to prove to me that legislation works, and it hasn’t happened.
We have compromised. The lack of violence, however hard it is for you to see, testifies on our behalf. We do police our own, typically from when they are in elementary school, but you will not have our examples. I say that real compromise would be for gun owners to get some rights back. Why is compromise always towards taking our rights away?
When this fails because people with your empty philosophies have succeeded, our children will wonder how it could be so bad. They will look back and see this decline, and, sadly, their grandchildren will promptly ruin it, just as you are doing.
A man can indeed make progress toward a cliff, but that does not make the change in position beneficial.
Wow, A! You smoked one out.
Who knew the “National” in the NRA’s name referred to Russia?