I am not a gun person, but I don’t consider myself an enemy of gun owners or gun rights advocates.
I’m philosophically in accord with much of what the gun rights movement says, while not in sympathy with some of its manifestations, including people in public places who carry around deadly weapons as if they were fashion accessories.
I believe that:
- Self-protection is a fundamental human right.
- The Constitution gives Americans an individual right to keep and bear arms.
- Firearms have useful and legitimate purposes.
- Ownership of firearms by responsible, law-abiding people is not a social problem.
- Down through history and across many cultures, denial of the right to own weapons is a defining mark of a subjugated people. (The other is denial of the right to testify in court).
- Guns are an icon of American culture, just as swords are an icon of Japanese culture.
A lot of gun-related legislation seems to me to be “security theater”—aimed at making people feel safer even though it doesn’t actually make them safer.
Here in New York state, where I live, the SAFE law requires a background check on the private sale of a firearm to someone not a close relative. Which means that if someone in rural New York sells a hunting rifle to a neighbor down the road he’s known most of his life, he has to go through the rigamarole of a background check. That is a big nuisance and adds little, that I can see, to public safety.
I haven’t followed the Open Carry movement in Texas, but it does seem to me illogical that if you can carry a concealed handgun and you can openly carry a firearm much more deadly than a handgun, you can’t openly carry a pistol in a holster.
What I don’t understand is why gun rights advocates insist on bringing the deadliest and scariest-looking military-type weapons into public places where they have no useful purpose.
If I saw one of these guys come into my favorite diner while I was eating lunch, my reaction would be to wonder whether I was about to witness a holdup, or the next psycho gun massacre. The person might say he was making a political point, and the gun is actually unloaded. How am I supposed to know that?
Besides, one of the main things my father taught me about guns is that the most dangerous gun is the one you assume is not loaded. Guns have a way of going off when you don’t expect them to. That’s why they should be treated with respect, as you would treat any other potentially hazardous machine.
I’m well aware that gun deaths are declining. So are deaths in motor vehicle accidents. The latter fact does not reduce my responsibility, as a motorist, to drive with care.
Gun ownership in the United States is declining. I don’t see how the gun rights cause is advanced by its supporters behaving in a way that alienates the public.
There is a lunatic fringe to the gun rights movement. I am certain it does not represent the majority of gun owners, and I hope that it does not represent the gun rights movement as a whole. Its effect on public opinion is not to make people more favorable to gun rights.
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