> Cor. Where do you live? It took me about 30 minutes after
> landing in Atlanta. I took a taxi to the hotel, when we got there
> I asked for a receipt, so the driver opened the glove
> compartment to get his receipt pad - and there it was, a
> handgun. Scared the living shit out of me.
Read his profile. He lives in the U.K. For what it’s worth, the only time I’ve sees guns (other than in movies and TV or picutres in books and magazines) in my life are the following:
a) In the holster strapped to the hip of policemen and security guards. I’ve never seen one of them take the gun out of the holster.
b) In cases on display in museums and such.
c) When I was very young, I saw some rifles in the hands of hunters in the rural area where I grew up.
d) A World War II Japanese rifle that my father brought back from his time in the Pacific as a Marine. It was well hidden away in our house, so I only saw it a half dozen times up to the point last year when my father sold it to my cousin who’s a collector of Marine memorabilia.
I grew up on a farm in Ohio. I lived significant amounts of time in Bowling Green and Columbus, Ohio; Austin, Texas; and Sarasota, Florida. I’ve lived for the past twenty and a half years in suburban Washington, D.C., except for three years when I lived in England. The last eleven and a half years I’ve lived in an apartment complex in the Washington suburbs that’s a mixture of working-class and middle-class residents.
It’s not true that everybody in the U.S. owns a gun. Indeed, I’ve been saying for years that if I ever hear any of my friends boast about guns they own, I will never enter their house again. If they’re the sort of people that own a gun for protection but keep it stored where no one can ever see it and don’t talk about it, there would be no way I could even learn about the fact that they own a gun. But if they’re the sort who boast about the guns they own, forget it. I don’t want to be associated with that kind of person.
Ahh, ‘tolerance’ in action! Anyway, this is GQ not IMHO or GD - you really should confine responses to answering the question about UK/Aus crime rates instead of editorializing on your prejudices.
> . . . you really should confine responses to answering the
> question about UK/Aus crime rates . . .
O.K., but it was amanset who first brought up the question of how common guns are in the U.S., not me. You just did the same thing to me that you did to sirjamesp earlier in this thread. sirjamesp and I mentioned offhand something that you don’t like, so you ordered us to quit talking about it in this forum. Look, I’m not interested in debating gun control, not here or in IMHO or GD. I see no reason to think that starting another thread about gun control would do anything except creating a huge thread that in the end wouldn’t change anybody’s views about the subject.
I wrote my post because amanset said something that at least implied that all Americans own guns or constantly see guns ready to be used. My point is that many of us virtually never seen guns and are careful to stay away from anyone would might use a gun. I meant that as an illustration of what some American’s views on guns were. I didn’t mean it as an attempt to persuade anyone to agree with me. I can’t think of anything less interesting than debating gun control with you.
sirjamesp unthruthfully said that I made a certain claim in the GD thread linked to, when in fact I had never made such a claim. I corrected the misinformation he was posting about me, and told him that if he wanted to argue with my GD post, he should argue with it in the proper forum. I hardly think that that it is unreasonable to ask people to abide by the rules of the board and to point out when they’re making false claims about you.
> Indeed, I’ve been saying for years that if I ever hear any of my
> friends boast about guns they own, I will never enter their
> house again.
Riboflavin wrote:
> Ahh, ‘tolerance’ in action!
I’ve never come close to having to back up that claim. Though I’ve never picked my friends on this basis, none of them ever boasted about the guns they owned. Nor has any of my coworkers (who are a more diverse group since I didn’t make any attempt to choose them). All this was in defense of my statement that many Americans never see working guns (except in the holsters of policemen).