Guns and shooting is a fun hobby that is very much family oriented. My earliest memory with my grandfather is target practicing with a .22. My dad was the one that taught me how to hunt. Which involved learning to walk in the woods without getting lost, tracking, and even training dogs for hunting. It’s always been a big part of my life. I taught my daughters to shoot and hunt. They prefer bird hunting over deer.
I treat guns with the same caution and respect that I would a chainsaw or table saw. Get careless and they’ll maim or kill you. You have to always be aware of what you’re doing and follow all the safety rules.
I’m not afraid. And doing things like locking my door, being aware of my surroundings, not doing stupid things in general (leaving the bar with a random guy or whatever), etc. make me feel safer than owning a gun does. I own several guns and about 90% of the time they are all useless with regards to my “safety”. Like right now. I’m on my couch with my laptop. My kitchen knives are closer and more easily accessible than any gun I have.
Guns are fun. They can be dangerous, yes, but not all by themselves and, in the hands of somebody stupid and/or intent on violence, the same can be said of a lot of things.
My earliest early gun memory is from when I was about 6 and my dad let me take out some cans with a .22 pistol. I counted the damn rounds, yes I did, and “treat every gun like it’s loaded” had been drilled into my head but I knew it was empty. I learned that that isn’t good enough when I spun around, excited because I’d hit every single can, and my dad yelled at me so suddenly and sharply that it made me cry. I brought that up to him once not that long ago and he said, actually, he’d been counting the rounds too but that wasn’t the point. And then, smugly, he said, “And I bet you’ve never done that since.” Nope, sure haven’t.
The discussion was going well until this happened. I don’t have a penis. I do have lots of guns. I follow the law and carry my glock where I can. I’d rather carry a shotgun in my pants, but I’m too short for that.
I honestly pray every day that I will never, ever kill anyone. I also pray that I will never have to eat my emergency food or cat food or cats. Its always good to be prepared, though.
In the rural South, where I spent my early childhood, guns are tools, art objects and stores of wealth all rolled into one. My dad had 3 or 4 different shot guns. I was too young to tell you what each was for but I’m sure some like the Mossberg were probably for accuracy and were preferred for hunting and others either had other purposes or were just lesser/alternate models.
The thing is that aside from being capable of food on the table, which they often did, they were also beautiful and if you hit hard times, the value of those weapons was solid. The same is true today. I don’t have any recent experience but I think it probably pretty rare that any practical weapon you buy today, if you keep it and maintain it won’t hold its value reasonably well. So what some may see as an obsession, others may see as a practical form of savings.
Really? You’d eat the cats? You already ate the cat food so they’re pretty scrawny by then. Are you really going to eat them to stay alive a couple of more days?
I’m not going to be all judge-y about the guns, if you’re being responsible it doesn’t matter to me. And I’ve known a few cats that deserved to die. But if it’s that bad do you want your last meal to be cat? I don’t know, maybe you’ve spent more time thinking about this than I have. But my first reaction is now way I eat the cats if the world’s coming to an end anyway.
I just don’t understand gun culture. I grew up in a house with guns. My dad was a cop, so he had his service weapon plus his off-duty weapon. And these things were just tools that his job required, nothing more or less. Neither my brother or I ever learned to shoot, or had any interest in doing so, because neither of us had any interest in getting into law enforcement, which seemed to be the only reason anyone would need a handgun. We didn’t hunt, so no reason for long guns either.
This is undoubtedly due to the fact that contemporaneous modern science had determined that life could not endure speeds over 20 mph, and that the only way to travel at high speed was on a small skiff in a breezy ocean going at, say, 12 mph. Or vertically, over a cliff.
Had 18th century stables managed to produce a horse that could travel at 50 mph for eight hours, then the equine-industrial complex would have slipped the framers some thousands of golden pictures of King George to include this provision of freedom.
There is nothing so hilarious to a foreigner as Americans’ pious reverence for their constitution.
How about this analogy: people (mostly) women will spend a great deal of money and effort on pretty dresses they may never wear. People (mostly men) will spend a great deal of money on tools they may never use. Why?
Because of the idea, the symbol, the feeling.
Having that dress in her closet allows a woman to dream about that romantic party she might go to an how pretty she will look then. And pretty = loved, secure, powerful.
The tools in the basement allow the man to dream about the instances he will fix the problems facing his family, making him feel secure, powerful, independent, loved.
Having that gun allows the owner to dream about that time (s)he will use it for defense, making him or her feel, again, independent, secure, powerful, protected and protecting, loved and loving.
A very quotation that is very selectively applied. There’s a lot of things that are banned for safety reasons, not just the aforementioned driving at 100mph, but somehow this quote is never relevant to them.
It also requires the assumption that owning a gun is ‘essential’, which is pretty much what’s in dispute in the thread.
I live in the UK, but as it happens, three of my great-uncles are/were into shooting: one ran a gun shop, until he lost his license after he tried to shoot his wife in an argument; the second is a farmer, and lost his after his teenage son borrowed it and lent it to a friend who used it to kill himself; the third is the only one who still has a gun, which is locked in a safe in his bedroom and hasn’t been out except for cleaning since the local shooting range closed about 20 years ago (there’s still one in the city, but his friends don’t go there).
My Mum also coincidentially has one, but that’s due to her work (small zoo, the local council required a gun to be kept on the premises, and it’s in her name). She’s quite unhappy about having to have it, and I don’t even know what kind it is, or where it’s kept.
Practical and logical debate aside… the fact that it’s an amendment represents the other side of the coin.
As soon as you take away power from the Constitution, you take power from the people.
You’ll never out reason that line of thinking.
Most English people don’t - however of all the Europeans, you should be the most supportive of a means and method to ensure that England never again falls under anything but Republic/Democratic rule.
Whenever I think about this type of issue, I wonder why the attitude of Americans who oppose gun regulations is so different from just about every other developed nation. Similarly, I wonder about the “Wild West” mentality of folk who prefer - in the 21st century - live in a society where private citizens are armed in public. Seems regressive, rather than progressive - harking to a day when many areas lacked effective law enforcement.
I don’t understand it - but then I don’t understand religious belief, wasteful consumerism, or many other aspects of the American way of life. Yes, America is a great place - there is no other country in which I’m eager to live. But I really wonder about why so many Americans seem to feel we ought not be governed by the same principles as seem to be accepted by the rest of the world. We ought to consume more than anyone else, inflict our preferences on foreign states, and by gum, we ought to pack our pistols when we go to the 7-11.
All the firearm enthusiasts I know are basically hobbyists and collectors, although with their own hunting, self-defense or fall-of-civilization slants. They geek out over gun oils, ammunition types, barrel break in procedures, techniques, etc… in exactly the same way that R/C modelers geek out over battery packs, servos, glues, etc…
The people who use them as a tool for self-defense or hunting usually have a small number of guns (like 1-2 rifles, shotguns or pistols) that are well kept but not tricked out, unlike the hobbyists who usually have small arsenals and a million accessories.
But why are guns a hobby, you ask? Because they’re a lot of fun- they make a lot of noise, they have a flash, they kick, and they put holes in paper or cans. I’m talking about guns in and of themselves as a hobby, not as a tool used in some other hobby like hunting, mind you.
And to some degree, they represent raw power in a way that few other things do- they’re weapons in the same sense as a knight’s sword, or a Viking’s spear, and for most gun owners, by extension, they represent their ability to do what they choose, and not have it forced upon them. This doesn’t mean they’re a hair from rebelling against the government, but their guns do serve to affirm that they are masters of their own domains and lords of their own castles, so to speak. They feel like without weaponry that they can’t defend their homes and families.
A lot of it I suspect is some sort of cultural holdover from American history- some combination of Scots-Irish immigrant values combined with frontier values forged by defending one’s home from hostile indians and other marauders. That’s why gun culture is more prevalent in the South and West, I believe.
