Don’t forget scared! These little weird paranoids are, above all, frightened. They hold a big, badass gun to their chests, in total fear of the boogeyman. I cannot imagine living my life in such a fearful state.
They are separate and apart from the gun owners who use their firearms for hunting, target shooting and (safely stowed/locked) home defense. We need the ones in that second category to be more vocal than the weird little gun fetishists.
Well, given the pernicious influence of genetics, complicated by additional generations of inbreeding, I suspect that the posterity of our present gun-strokers will be no better at feeling shame than their forebears.
The real problem here is that gun stroking serves such a powerful need, as madmonk28 alludes to. I suspect we’re dealing with adults who as adolescents generally lacked the capacity to distinguish themselves through any meaningful accomplishments and felt impotent in influencing other people in any particular way. Immersing themselves in gun culture is an easy way to develop some kind of identity. It allows for a persecution complex that explains peer rejection in a more palatable fashion than their previous personality failings did. They now can parade about displaying their guns and getting reactions from other people instead of being invisible. They can imagine themselves as patriots and superheroes. They can become experts in a terminology and lexicon, mocking others who are not well-versed in it.
Imagine how threatened you would feel at the prospect of having all that taken away.
There’s the problem. We know there are far more gun owners who are more or less sane, much like any of us. We also know there are people for whom the epithet “gun nut” applies. But what is the proportion? The NRA appears eager to keep them unified in solidarity against the alleged “gun grabbers”. Well, OK, how many people who advocate for stricter control and regulation actually want a nation-wide confiscation program? Rather few, I would guess.
One might even be tempted to suspect Adam Lanza of being in the gun dealers’ pay, had he not killed himself before he could have cashed any checks. 
Apart from being much, much more numerous.
If you had predator drones, would your really care if soemone held onto their AR-15 even if they could shoot 100 rounds without changing their magazine?
Clearly you have never seen Red Dawn. We have to be ready. Wolverines!
You haven’t made one.
Of course they don’t condone the crime…but they are sick fucks!
So, owning a human being is the same as owning an inanimate object? Nice reach there.
Your great great grandchildren will be so ashamed of how retarded you are they’ll most likely go and shoot up a couple o fhundred kindergardeners. Or they’ll just take after you and felch a couple of goats a day.
You guys are fantastic. Complaining in the very same few posts about the lack of reasonable gun owners, and then saying that mere ownership of a gun is the moral equivelant to being a slavemaster.
Your grandpa that’s kept a shotgun in his attic for 40 years - he might as well be whipping a slave right now, right? Your cousin who likes to go out a few times a month and shoot competitive matches - he might as well be raping some slaves.
It’s funny how you accuse gun owners of being obsessive and unbalanced, and yet you believe that the mere possession of one sort of physical object - one that the vast, vast majority of people who posess it never hurt anyone with, is morally equivelant to one of the most heinous acts you can possibly commit is so over the top that one has to wonder about your sanity.
There are plenty of responsible gun advocates right here on this board. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge them as such only shows your bias. Your definition of responsible is probably something near a person who’s willing to “compromise” such that maybe he could keep black powder rifle locked up in storage at an official gun club where after seeking written permission with 6 weeks advanced notice he may be allowed supervised access to it for 2 hours. See, that would be reasonable, anyone wanting more than that is a paranoid nut.
That’s quite ridiculous, since no one is buying guns because some kids were killed. People are buying guns in response to proposed legislation that would prevent them from doing that in the future. There would be no surge in gun sales if the threat of dimiished access wasn’t real.
You make it sound as if it’s paranoid, as if there’s no basis to their concerns. But you undoubtedly advocate, and there’s serious discussion about, doing exactly that. Taking the guns in question away, or at least preventing their future sale, right? You’re proposing banning these guns, and then when people get concerned the guns are going to get banned, you’re dismissing them as paranoid. I can’t tell if it’s dishonest or just really stupid.
The dime store psychology applied to “gun nuts” always cracks me up. Undoubtedly you would classify me as being part of “gun culture” or a gun nut, and yeah I’ve met quite a few people with a similar interest in the hobby.
Almost invariably, the “gun nut” type tends to be generally more self reliant and less dependent than average. “Paranoid” is sort of a complex subject. They’re generally not fearful. You have this image that we’re all just cowering at all times because the big bad world is out to get us, but quite the opposite. We’ve just chosen to be the people who are ultimately responsible for our safety and that of our families. Most of us don’t think about it much - you probably imagine we clutch our guns every day to compensate for our small penises, but unless you’re actually going out to engage in some recreational or practice shooting, you’re not thinking about it. Gun owners are as paranoid about their safety as people who own fire extinguishers are about fire. Your statements are as ridiculous to me as saying “those paranoid nuts, I bet they sit around their house all day just clutching their fire extinguisher paranoid that a fire is going to break out at any second”
If I may engage in my own dime store psychology, here’s what I think. As a whole, men who advocate gun control and especially those who mock gun owners are insecure. They are almost invariably more dependent, and more feminine than the average men. They’ve decided that they aren’t comfortable taking ultimate responsibility of their safety and that of their families - that they’re going to rely on other (real) men to handle that, like the police. So when they see someone who actually is independent, who’s ultimately taking that responsibility, it reflects their own lack of it. So you turn your insecurity into an imagined insecurity on the part of those others. It’s not that you’re ultimately not taking responsibility, it’s that they’re all paranoid evil crazies.
I’m not saying this applies to every single gun rights and gun control advocate, but it’s a general pattern I’ve seen in over a decade of observing these things. I’ve met dozens or more “gun nuts” and gun control advocates, and you can generalize them pretty well. There are very few men who are gun control advocates who are, well, self reliant manly men. To them, gun ownership to some degree represents the rugged individualism that they’ve chosen to give up, and it bothers them.
If there are people who think that owning a gun is morally equivelant to enslaving another human being, what sort of reasonable stopping do you compromise on?
Just for historical perspective, I kinda wished people could read the message board posts of their great great grandparents.
That’d be an eye opener.
Please tell me you were going for parody with this. Please.
So to be clear, the assertion that owning a gun is as bad as enslaving another human being, and that gun owners are all incredibly paranoid people who sit around their house all day and desperately clutch their guns to their chests is reasonable enough to you to not object to, but the idea that male gun control advocates are less likely to be the rugged individualist type is so over the top that it can only be parody?
You don’t think you might be just a bit biased here?
Excellent point! No, wait, that’s nonsense. Never mind.
But you don’t have to worry about me, I sincerely doubt that any such restrictions or regulations will be effective. I’m more or less sane, and reasonable.
But every time something like this happens, our numbers shrink. And will continue to shrink, unless these things suddenly stop happening.
Think that’s likely? I wish I did. But I don’t, and I’ll hazard the guess that you don’t either.
Yup, I remember a thread in which a doper mentioned that if someone knocks on their front door, they grab a gun before they answer; and this wasn’t someone living in a place with a lot of crime. I can’t imagine being that scared of life, it’s sad (pathetic actually).
What’s all this about gum nuts? I chew a piece now and again, but I don’t think it’s excessive.
I prefer guv mints myself.
Broadly the same thing happened when Obama was originally elected. It’s paranoia.
What the fuck? Yes, people were paranoid that Obama was going to try to enact gun control when he took office. Those fears were unfounded at the time, and he did no such thing.
HOWEVER, CURRENTLY his stated policy is to work with congress to enact new gun control measures, specifically aimed at the sort of guns that this thread is about, and that he’s also going to try to figure out which executive powers he can use to persue that goal.
How in the fuck is that paranoia then? Are you all blind?
If you need a *fourth *AR-15, you are probably paranoid.
You gotta get one with one of the longer barrels and tighter tolerances if you want to shoot accurately enough to hit those moving goalposts.