Armed America…
on July 15th, 2009 at 2:59 pmThis is a placeholder post, kind of, while we trek kids all over MA and while I try to recover from whatever made me sleep for 19 hours yesterday. Feeling like crap, in other words.
My family owned a lot of guns, but not as many as some other people I knew, maybe ten or so, which over a lifetime isn't many. We hunted, every season, my father and brother and I–at least until I was sixteen or so–with most of our attention paid to deer season. Venison is good, you know? If you can it, most flatlanders can't tell it from beef.
Anyway, to my point: maybe this book will scare you, maybe it will make you feel better, but it seems pretty realistic to me, as compared to what the two opposing poles of American politics might tell you.
Visit Armed America for more pix and stories/explanations.
What you say sounds reasonable at first blush for people with little to no experience with firearms. They see them as day-to-day death dealers.You're right, in general, about the rural/urban breakdown, too, but I can only write from my experience, which was decidedly rural,until I was in my mid-twenties. Everyone I knew had guns, and everyone, to a person, nearly–see me phrasing carefully here–used them the way they're intended, as tools or as hobbies indicated.It'll likely come as no surprise to you that the Nazi party registered their country's guns. Easier to track down and confiscate then. I'd like to get guns out of the hands of criminals, too, but I don't see why reasonable people shouldn't be able to have and use them.
I want to respond with a significant, i.e. full-brain, effort. It'll take me to the weekend to do so,probably. Thanks for reading.
Well there are problems though to everything. America has always been sharply divided between rural and urban people. Rural people tend to see guns as natural things like shovels and hammers, urban people tend to see guns as threats to their family. Figures — hard to pin down — continue to show some 14,000 to 30,000 Americans are gunned down every year — not by al Quida or Taliban, but by other Americans. Guns are not regulated well and can be "bought" easily by people who later prove they were not qualified to get them in the first place. Gun laws in D.C. can easily be circumvented by getting them in say, Idaho and then then bringing them in. There are other problems that could be addressed but I won't try to list them all right now. These problems could be taken care of easily by gun registration and/or other types of regulation. Now don't just shoot back at me, there are probably more people like me than you. If we can't regulate guns somehow, someday they will have to be abolished. That would be hard for everybody. I would love to see a beginning of good regulation. Perhaps columns like this where a fair exchange of thoughts can take place.