
What Critics Don't Understand About Gun Culture - tntn
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/gun-culture/554351/?single_page=true
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rabboRubble
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
Have any of your relatives had a mishap?

~~~
rabboRubble
Nope, thank god. I’ve shamed them a bit when I found out these particulars.

------
iamnotlarry
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.

~~~
zimpenfish
> It's about an armed citizenry to keep the government in check.

Which made sense 200 years ago. Today, against a government armed with reaper
drones et al, a populace armed with AR-15s would last about an hour if the
government really wanted to put them down.

~~~
tntn
I see similar statements to this quite frequently around this topic, and every
time they strike me as quite simplistic.

If such a conflict were to ever happen (and let us pray that it doesn't), I
feel that it would be quite a bit more complicated than "government brings out
the big guns, game over," for several reasons:

1\. This ignores the historical track record of the US military in asymmetric
warfare, fighting determined foes with inferior equipment and weaponry. I'm
thinking of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Not perfect comparisons, but
worth some thought.

2\. It is likely that the US military would see significant desertion and
insubordination in such a situation. Military personnel are people too, and
many may be reluctant to go to war against their own country.

3\. Every state has an Army National Guard and an Air National Guard, and many
states has state defense forces. While the National Guard units are legally
obligated to obey orders from the federal government, there is no guarantee of
what would happen were there to actually be a domestic insurgency.

A populace armed with AR-15s may well be enough of a problem that the opposing
force weakens its opposition and starts to fracture.

Again, let us all hope that nothing like this ever happens, but that shouldn't
stop us from analyzing in more detail what might happen.

~~~
zimpenfish
> every time they strike me as quite simplistic.

Sure but the whole "we need guns as protection against the government"
argument is equally simplistic.

> many may be reluctant to go to war against their own country

Perhaps but the enthusiasm with which e.g. ICE officers have turned against
their own country does not give optimism here.

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scarface74
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
>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
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.

------
rdtsc
> 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
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
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..

------
RickJWagner
The problem is mostly about culture, not guns.

The crazy gunman shooting at a school pictures himself as George Clooney in a
Tarantino movie.

------
Simulacra
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
>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
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.

------
solipsism
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.

~~~
Turing_Machine
> 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-o...](http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/schools-are-still-one-of-the-
safest-places-for-children-researcher-says/)

You should be embarrassed to even make that claim.

~~~
yongjik
> The number of mass murders (not all of which use AR-15s, by any means)
> committed at schools averages about one per year.

Only in America you will find someone saying, with a straight face, that _one
mass murder at school per year_ does not constitute social crisis...

~~~
Turing_Machine
Way more children drown in swimming pools.

Something like 15 teenagers (comparable to the number killed in Florida) die
_every day_ from texting and driving.

Why aren't those things "social crises"?

~~~
IntronExon
More people died from the Spanish Flu epidemic than all of WWI. Was WWI not a
crisis? Half of all people who have ever lived, died as a result of mosquito-
borne illnesses, do all other causes of death not matter? Shall we stop
bothering to develop autonomous vehicles because deaths from automotive
accidents pale next to that?

Note that I’m not even attacking your premise that accidental deaths during an
activity voluntarily engaged, in some way relates to mass murder.

------
jacknews
"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
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.

~~~
chrisaycock
From Australia's own crime statistics: "Homicide in Australia has declined
over the last 25 years. The current homicide incidence rate is the lowest on
record in the past 25 years."

[http://crimestats.aic.gov.au/NHMP/1_trends/](http://crimestats.aic.gov.au/NHMP/1_trends/)

~~~
CompanionCuuube
"The US is safer than ever — and Americans don’t have any idea"

America also had a decline over the last 25 years.

[https://www.vox.com/2015/5/4/8546497/crime-rate-
america](https://www.vox.com/2015/5/4/8546497/crime-rate-america)

