11 ms·

What Critics Don't Understand About Gun Culture

21 points by tntn 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rdtsc 9y ago
> It starts with the consciousness of a threat. Perhaps not the kind of threat my family has experienced. Some people experience more. Why can't it just be a hobby, or hunting, or sport. I remember having fun shooting at a range. Around 8th grade I joined a local small bore club and shooting range and we shot .22 rifles. It was tons of fun. It wasn't in US, not sure if those things exist here for kids at that age. But anyway I can definitely see people doing it for that reason.
- adamrezich 9y ago
  I graduated high school (US) in 2009. My mom did the same, at the same school, 30 years earlier. When she was in high school, guys would leave shotguns and rifles in gun racks in the backs of their pickup trucks, in the school parking lot, and there was never an issue. In 1991 (year I was born), a kid brought a sawed-off shotgun to my high school and held up a class, discharging something like 10 shots into the wall. Nobody was injured and everyone made it out alright. This did not get weeks of nonstop national news coverage like contemporary school shooting incidents do. The kid brought a sawed-off shotgun, and handgun legislation was the thing of the time (which has now mysteriously switched to rifle legislation for no perceivably valid reason). Also, nobody died, so there weren't any dead kids to use as the emotional bedrock for any sort of political activism. When I was in high school, a kid at either my high school or maybe it was the school across town, got a felony for leaving a paintball gun (from the weekend or whatever) in his car and parking it in the school parking lot. What's changed in the past 30 years?
  - jchb 9y ago
    Deinstitutionalisation - reduction of involuntary mental care and closure of large psychiatric hospitals - took full effect? Combine that with (local) economic downturn, veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan wars..
iamnotlarry 9y ago
This is written by one person who is one small part of gun culture. There are lots of angles in "gun culture." I live in a place that goes pretty strongly pro-gun. I think that most of "gun culture" around here is not much connected to the gun culture described by this author. A lot of the gun supporters live in rural America and only experience the types of threats related here when watching Hollywood productions. Everybody these days is feeling the threat of all the mass shootings, but very few in rural America have been personally touched by them. They also haven't really experienced gang violence, home invasion, mugging, etc. We all know those things happen, and some feel some distant anxiety about them. But most in rural America have not experiences them except through news reports. Yet, gun support is strongest in rural America. Some point to hunting. Some will talk about self-defense. Many are just enthusiasts who like to target-shoot for enjoyment. Some feel some nationalistic pull to defend against Germany^H^HRussia^H^HChina^H^HNorth Korea^H^H or whoever is the latest poster child threat to the American Way. And some think that from the very beginning of America, there has been one constant threat--the one threat the founders new first-hand and the reason for the right to bear arms. It seems like terrorism to actually say it, but for some the main reason to bear arms is to be able to rebel against tyranny--foreign and especially domestic. In other words, it's important for people to be able to occupy a wildlife refuge and "take it back" from the government. Taken to the extreme, this right is for the express purpose to allow civilians to kill policemen and military personnel in a pitched battle. It's not really about hunting or defense against home invasion. It's about an armed citizenry to keep the government in check. That's a part of "gun culture" with which the author may not be able to relate. That's very scary to a lot of people. And to some that thinking is no longer needed to keep people safe in the modern world. But to some, it's absolutely vital to the preservation of the Constitution. You may not agree with it. The author of this article may not agree with it either. But it just goes to show that there is not one true gun culture. There are different reasons to oppose guns and different reasons to support them.
- krapp 9y ago
  >It seems like terrorism to actually say it(...) It is. Let's just call a spade a spade here.. that interpretation of the Second Amendment endorses and justifies domestic terrorism. "Tyranny" can mean anything from an oppressive totalitarian state to the dehumanization of modern technological society to the existence of the IRS to too many foreigners in your neighborhood - or, of course, gun control itself. Tyranny is in the eye of the beholder.
solipsism 9y ago
The author, like most people who oppose common sense regulations like the banning of assault rifles, sees the world in simplistic black and white. There are bad guys who want to harm people, and who scoff at laws. And there are good guys, who follow laws, are patriots, and just want to protect their family and community. Of course the world is a lot more complicated than that. Yesterday's good guy is tomorrow's school shooter. Domestic violence, alcohol, mental health disorders, theft, and accidents are all cracks in this simplistic worldview. No matter how you cut it, a world where all the good guys have assault rifles with high capacity magazines is a world where the effects of the inevitable -- the breakdown of social order -- are magnified. A shooting spree instead of a bar fight. A family murder-suicide instead of a black eye and a CPS visit. 20 school children dead instead of 10. This is what NRA supporters don't seem to understand about the world. They're stuck in a comic book good-vs-evil story and they're the hero.
- jchb 9y ago
  Agree with what you say, but better be careful with the term "assault rifle", as the people on the other side of this issue will (correctly) point out that the military definition of an assault rifle includes that it has a fully automatic mode - and such weapons are effectively already banned in the USA. Also, another good one (that that you didn't mention), the weapon name prefix "AR" does not stand for "Assault Rifle". What to say instead? Perhaps that semi-automatic weapons, and magazines over a certain size, should be banned.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  > Yesterday's good guy is tomorrow's school shooter. Sorry, but that's patent nonsense. Somewhere north of 3 million AR-15 rifles have been sold. The number of mass murders (not all of which use AR-15s, by any means) committed at schools averages about one per year. http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/schools-are-still-one-of-the-safest-places-for-children-researcher-says/ http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/schools-are-still-one-o... You should be embarrassed to even make that claim.
  - solipsism 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jacknews 9y ago
"At the end of this process, your life has changed for the better." Not really. Life would change for the better if the bad guys found it very difficult to obtain and keep possession of weapons, so the rest didn't have to play the arms race. Of course, since we don't know who's bad and who's good, that means everyone should find it extremely hard to buy and possess. Angry ex-boyfriends would then probably not be (fire-)armed unless they were, or willing to become, serious criminals. The whole "responsible ownership", and "guns don't kill people, people do", argument also appears broken. It is not legal to own a cruise missile for example, so clearly the weapons themselves are the problem, and there is a level of destructive power beyond which individuals should not be trusted. IMHO that level should be drawn lower; everyone gets crazy or depressed sometimes, we should reduce the potential for severe consequences. And even an AR-15 isn't going to be much help against an oppressive government, as the tanks roll down the street, so the whole 2nd amendment argument seems very weak too.
- chrismcb 9y ago
  Why do you think the "guns don't kill people" argument is broken? A gun is merely a tool that a murder uses to kill. After the gun control act in Australia the number of people killed didn't change much, just the method of killing them. The problem with most gun control arguments is it ignores the fact that someone choose to kill someone. The fact they choose to use a gun isn't really relevant.
  - jacknews 9y ago
    Not true, Australian homicide rate reduced substantially. Gun deaths and injuries of course reduced very substantially. And many gun deaths and injuries are not premeditated murders, but accidents, suicides, and "heat of the moment" situations. If "guns don't kill people", we'd trust (good) people to wield cruise missiles. Clearly the weapons do kill people.
    - CompanionCuuube 9y ago
      We do trust good people with grenades/rockets/missiles. They're classified as Destructive Devices by the BATFE and you as a citizen can apply for approval to own them. As for cruise missiles, those are covered by international treaty so outside the scope of discussion.
rabboRubble 9y ago
I grew up in a family with a lot of guns around. As an adult, I've never felt the need to waste my money on them. For me it's just another thing I have no real need or want for, that would require occasional maintenance, and occasional training to stay proficient. I have enough stuff to clean and enough stuff to learn that interests me a lot more. My issue with many members of my family is that they are sloppy. They do not treat the weapons as the instruments of war that they are. Having a shotgun, loaded and propped in a corner is not good stewardship, especially when entertaining visitors. Having an unlocked gun cabinet is not good stewardship. Tossing loaded rifles in the back of a pickup with the barrels pointing backward towards the tailgate and towards people who do not know the rifles are loaded when they unloaded the truck, not good stewardship. Blasé attitudes abound and as far as I can tell, blasé attitudes towards gun ownership increases the more the owner reveres the second amendment or protecting the constitution or whatever. Worship at the gun alter if it suits your interests or if you have a legitimate need as the author seems to. Be a good steward of the responsibility that gun ownership entails.
- RickJWagner 9y ago
  Have any of your relatives had a mishap?
  - rabboRubble 9y ago
    Nope, thank god. I’ve shamed them a bit when I found out these particulars.
Simulacra 9y ago
My husband and I have guns, and we rarely shoot them. Mainly because of cost, time, and the effort it takes to go to a shooting range in an area where few exist. They're good for protection, but we both really enjoy the mechanical engineering behind them. Science behind delivering a projectile do a paper target 100 yards away. They are absolutely should be more restrictions, but I think it's also a slippery slope.
- senectus1 9y ago
  >They're good for protection I'd really like to see the stats on this. because I have a feeling that this is quite possibly provably incorrect.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Easy. Please be less lazy in finding them (one Google search is all that takes to get Eurostat data) and consider that all kinds of statistics are incomplete. Preferably skip US stats as they are loaded with noise, mishandling and organized crime confusion.
scarface74 9y ago
I'm not morally opposed to gun control. For me, it's more practical. Let's say that we did "ban guns" like we "ban drugs" and now we have a "War on guns". How affective has the "War on drugs" been? How evenly has it been applied? Why would anyone think that the same biased criminal justice system that applies punishment and enforcement of drugs unequally would all of the sudden start applying stricter gun laws equally? Why do we think that we could anymore keep guns out of the hands of criminals than we could keep drugs out of the hands of people?
- krapp 9y ago
  >Why do we think that we could anymore keep guns out of the hands of criminals than we could keep drugs out of the hands of people Your equivocation seems to imply that gun regulation would either have either no or negative effect on gun ownership and usage. Yet other countries with stricter gun laws than the US have fewer incidents of gun violence, which would appear to suggest that it is, in fact, possible for gun laws to be effective at limiting gun violence. The question, then, is not whether gun laws can keep guns out of the hands of criminals, but whether one believes they should.
  - scarface74 9y ago
    I didn't say it wouldn't have any effect. I'm saying that that the trade off of giving the government more power to lock people up isn't worth it. The criminal justice system has harmed far more lives by locking up non violent offenders than gun violence.
- craigvn 9y ago
  Don't confuse gun control with banning guns. If we look at Australia for example, a country often cited in regards to gun control (and I live there), guns are not banned. You can buy a gun, I have family with guns, there are gun shops. But there are restrictions on the type of gun you can buy, 12 gauge shotgun for duck shooting is ok, AR-15 for people shooting is a no go. But the big difference is the culture, most people in Australia simply don't want to own a gun, it doesn't define who they are. They don't feel threatened or unsafe by not having one.
RickJWagner 9y ago
The problem is mostly about culture, not guns. The crazy gunman shooting at a school pictures himself as George Clooney in a Tarantino movie.
rthrowayay 9y ago
I think it is interesting the same kind of bias seems to be present in the gun control debate and the immigration debate and both sides seem to be oblivious to their own fallacy. In fact you will have people one side of the cultural divide pointing at the opposite fallacy but ignoring the similar one pushed by their fellow travellers. For example we need to stop Muslim immigration because of rare terrorist events or we need stricter gun regulations because of rare school shootings.
xxxdarrenxxx 9y ago
Every country in history had people walking around with weapons at one point in time. America is not special, they are just emotionally underdeveloped. People are scared of change and instead of talking about their fear and emotions they like the soothing of ignoring true emotions by having a gun for an answer.

21 points by tntn 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

> It starts with the consciousness of a threat. Perhaps not the kind of threat my family has experienced. Some people experience more. Why can't it just be a hobby, or hunting, or sport. I remember having fun shooting at a range. Around 8th grade I joined a local small bore club and shooting range and we shot .22 rifles. It was tons of fun. It wasn't in US, not sure if those things exist here for kids at that age. But anyway I can definitely see people doing it for that reason.

adamrezich 9y ago
I graduated high school (US) in 2009. My mom did the same, at the same school, 30 years earlier. When she was in high school, guys would leave shotguns and rifles in gun racks in the backs of their pickup trucks, in the school parking lot, and there was never an issue. In 1991 (year I was born), a kid brought a sawed-off shotgun to my high school and held up a class, discharging something like 10 shots into the wall. Nobody was injured and everyone made it out alright. This did not get weeks of nonstop national news coverage like contemporary school shooting incidents do. The kid brought a sawed-off shotgun, and handgun legislation was the thing of the time (which has now mysteriously switched to rifle legislation for no perceivably valid reason). Also, nobody died, so there weren't any dead kids to use as the emotional bedrock for any sort of political activism. When I was in high school, a kid at either my high school or maybe it was the school across town, got a felony for leaving a paintball gun (from the weekend or whatever) in his car and parking it in the school parking lot. What's changed in the past 30 years?
- jchb 9y ago
  Deinstitutionalisation - reduction of involuntary mental care and closure of large psychiatric hospitals - took full effect? Combine that with (local) economic downturn, veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan wars..

iamnotlarry 9y ago

This is written by one person who is one small part of gun culture. There are lots of angles in "gun culture." I live in a place that goes pretty strongly pro-gun. I think that most of "gun culture" around here is not much connected to the gun culture described by this author. A lot of the gun supporters live in rural America and only experience the types of threats related here when watching Hollywood productions. Everybody these days is feeling the threat of all the mass shootings, but very few in rural America have been personally touched by them. They also haven't really experienced gang violence, home invasion, mugging, etc. We all know those things happen, and some feel some distant anxiety about them. But most in rural America have not experiences them except through news reports. Yet, gun support is strongest in rural America. Some point to hunting. Some will talk about self-defense. Many are just enthusiasts who like to target-shoot for enjoyment. Some feel some nationalistic pull to defend against Germany^H^HRussia^H^HChina^H^HNorth Korea^H^H or whoever is the latest poster child threat to the American Way. And some think that from the very beginning of America, there has been one constant threat--the one threat the founders new first-hand and the reason for the right to bear arms. It seems like terrorism to actually say it, but for some the main reason to bear arms is to be able to rebel against tyranny--foreign and especially domestic. In other words, it's important for people to be able to occupy a wildlife refuge and "take it back" from the government. Taken to the extreme, this right is for the express purpose to allow civilians to kill policemen and military personnel in a pitched battle. It's not really about hunting or defense against home invasion. It's about an armed citizenry to keep the government in check. That's a part of "gun culture" with which the author may not be able to relate. That's very scary to a lot of people. And to some that thinking is no longer needed to keep people safe in the modern world. But to some, it's absolutely vital to the preservation of the Constitution. You may not agree with it. The author of this article may not agree with it either. But it just goes to show that there is not one true gun culture. There are different reasons to oppose guns and different reasons to support them.

krapp 9y ago
>It seems like terrorism to actually say it(...) It is. Let's just call a spade a spade here.. that interpretation of the Second Amendment endorses and justifies domestic terrorism. "Tyranny" can mean anything from an oppressive totalitarian state to the dehumanization of modern technological society to the existence of the IRS to too many foreigners in your neighborhood - or, of course, gun control itself. Tyranny is in the eye of the beholder.

solipsism 9y ago

The author, like most people who oppose common sense regulations like the banning of assault rifles, sees the world in simplistic black and white. There are bad guys who want to harm people, and who scoff at laws. And there are good guys, who follow laws, are patriots, and just want to protect their family and community. Of course the world is a lot more complicated than that. Yesterday's good guy is tomorrow's school shooter. Domestic violence, alcohol, mental health disorders, theft, and accidents are all cracks in this simplistic worldview. No matter how you cut it, a world where all the good guys have assault rifles with high capacity magazines is a world where the effects of the inevitable -- the breakdown of social order -- are magnified. A shooting spree instead of a bar fight. A family murder-suicide instead of a black eye and a CPS visit. 20 school children dead instead of 10. This is what NRA supporters don't seem to understand about the world. They're stuck in a comic book good-vs-evil story and they're the hero.

jchb 9y ago
Agree with what you say, but better be careful with the term "assault rifle", as the people on the other side of this issue will (correctly) point out that the military definition of an assault rifle includes that it has a fully automatic mode - and such weapons are effectively already banned in the USA. Also, another good one (that that you didn't mention), the weapon name prefix "AR" does not stand for "Assault Rifle". What to say instead? Perhaps that semi-automatic weapons, and magazines over a certain size, should be banned.
Turing_Machine 9y ago
> Yesterday's good guy is tomorrow's school shooter. Sorry, but that's patent nonsense. Somewhere north of 3 million AR-15 rifles have been sold. The number of mass murders (not all of which use AR-15s, by any means) committed at schools averages about one per year. http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/schools-are-still-one-of-the-safest-places-for-children-researcher-says/ http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/schools-are-still-one-o... You should be embarrassed to even make that claim.
- solipsism 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jacknews 9y ago

"At the end of this process, your life has changed for the better." Not really. Life would change for the better if the bad guys found it very difficult to obtain and keep possession of weapons, so the rest didn't have to play the arms race. Of course, since we don't know who's bad and who's good, that means everyone should find it extremely hard to buy and possess. Angry ex-boyfriends would then probably not be (fire-)armed unless they were, or willing to become, serious criminals. The whole "responsible ownership", and "guns don't kill people, people do", argument also appears broken. It is not legal to own a cruise missile for example, so clearly the weapons themselves are the problem, and there is a level of destructive power beyond which individuals should not be trusted. IMHO that level should be drawn lower; everyone gets crazy or depressed sometimes, we should reduce the potential for severe consequences. And even an AR-15 isn't going to be much help against an oppressive government, as the tanks roll down the street, so the whole 2nd amendment argument seems very weak too.

chrismcb 9y ago
Why do you think the "guns don't kill people" argument is broken? A gun is merely a tool that a murder uses to kill. After the gun control act in Australia the number of people killed didn't change much, just the method of killing them. The problem with most gun control arguments is it ignores the fact that someone choose to kill someone. The fact they choose to use a gun isn't really relevant.
- jacknews 9y ago
  Not true, Australian homicide rate reduced substantially. Gun deaths and injuries of course reduced very substantially. And many gun deaths and injuries are not premeditated murders, but accidents, suicides, and "heat of the moment" situations. If "guns don't kill people", we'd trust (good) people to wield cruise missiles. Clearly the weapons do kill people.
  - CompanionCuuube 9y ago
    We do trust good people with grenades/rockets/missiles. They're classified as Destructive Devices by the BATFE and you as a citizen can apply for approval to own them. As for cruise missiles, those are covered by international treaty so outside the scope of discussion.

rabboRubble 9y ago

I grew up in a family with a lot of guns around. As an adult, I've never felt the need to waste my money on them. For me it's just another thing I have no real need or want for, that would require occasional maintenance, and occasional training to stay proficient. I have enough stuff to clean and enough stuff to learn that interests me a lot more. My issue with many members of my family is that they are sloppy. They do not treat the weapons as the instruments of war that they are. Having a shotgun, loaded and propped in a corner is not good stewardship, especially when entertaining visitors. Having an unlocked gun cabinet is not good stewardship. Tossing loaded rifles in the back of a pickup with the barrels pointing backward towards the tailgate and towards people who do not know the rifles are loaded when they unloaded the truck, not good stewardship. Blasé attitudes abound and as far as I can tell, blasé attitudes towards gun ownership increases the more the owner reveres the second amendment or protecting the constitution or whatever. Worship at the gun alter if it suits your interests or if you have a legitimate need as the author seems to. Be a good steward of the responsibility that gun ownership entails.

RickJWagner 9y ago
Have any of your relatives had a mishap?
- rabboRubble 9y ago
  Nope, thank god. I’ve shamed them a bit when I found out these particulars.

Simulacra 9y ago

My husband and I have guns, and we rarely shoot them. Mainly because of cost, time, and the effort it takes to go to a shooting range in an area where few exist. They're good for protection, but we both really enjoy the mechanical engineering behind them. Science behind delivering a projectile do a paper target 100 yards away. They are absolutely should be more restrictions, but I think it's also a slippery slope.

senectus1 9y ago
>They're good for protection I'd really like to see the stats on this. because I have a feeling that this is quite possibly provably incorrect.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Easy. Please be less lazy in finding them (one Google search is all that takes to get Eurostat data) and consider that all kinds of statistics are incomplete. Preferably skip US stats as they are loaded with noise, mishandling and organized crime confusion.

scarface74 9y ago

I'm not morally opposed to gun control. For me, it's more practical. Let's say that we did "ban guns" like we "ban drugs" and now we have a "War on guns". How affective has the "War on drugs" been? How evenly has it been applied? Why would anyone think that the same biased criminal justice system that applies punishment and enforcement of drugs unequally would all of the sudden start applying stricter gun laws equally? Why do we think that we could anymore keep guns out of the hands of criminals than we could keep drugs out of the hands of people?

krapp 9y ago
>Why do we think that we could anymore keep guns out of the hands of criminals than we could keep drugs out of the hands of people Your equivocation seems to imply that gun regulation would either have either no or negative effect on gun ownership and usage. Yet other countries with stricter gun laws than the US have fewer incidents of gun violence, which would appear to suggest that it is, in fact, possible for gun laws to be effective at limiting gun violence. The question, then, is not whether gun laws can keep guns out of the hands of criminals, but whether one believes they should.
- scarface74 9y ago
  I didn't say it wouldn't have any effect. I'm saying that that the trade off of giving the government more power to lock people up isn't worth it. The criminal justice system has harmed far more lives by locking up non violent offenders than gun violence.
craigvn 9y ago
Don't confuse gun control with banning guns. If we look at Australia for example, a country often cited in regards to gun control (and I live there), guns are not banned. You can buy a gun, I have family with guns, there are gun shops. But there are restrictions on the type of gun you can buy, 12 gauge shotgun for duck shooting is ok, AR-15 for people shooting is a no go. But the big difference is the culture, most people in Australia simply don't want to own a gun, it doesn't define who they are. They don't feel threatened or unsafe by not having one.

RickJWagner 9y ago

The problem is mostly about culture, not guns. The crazy gunman shooting at a school pictures himself as George Clooney in a Tarantino movie.

rthrowayay 9y ago

I think it is interesting the same kind of bias seems to be present in the gun control debate and the immigration debate and both sides seem to be oblivious to their own fallacy. In fact you will have people one side of the cultural divide pointing at the opposite fallacy but ignoring the similar one pushed by their fellow travellers. For example we need to stop Muslim immigration because of rare terrorist events or we need stricter gun regulations because of rare school shootings.

xxxdarrenxxx 9y ago

Every country in history had people walking around with weapons at one point in time. America is not special, they are just emotionally underdeveloped. People are scared of change and instead of talking about their fear and emotions they like the soothing of ignoring true emotions by having a gun for an answer.