What is your emotional response to gun-rights advocates?

Exhausting. There is a counter argument for every point for gun control. One can argue anything endlessly and just by providing the opposite viewpoint. It tends to exhaust the momentum from tragedy’s in the news. Then we give up and try again after another shooting and repeat. It is time to try something unique. Or else it is just bitch at each other and repeat. No one wins even gun sales goes up every time we scare the gun owners that we are coming for their guns.

No one wins even gun sales goes up every time we scare the gun owners that we are coming for their guns… I don’t have the stats to back up this claim. Just heard it on CNN years ago.

I was shooting guns before most Americans were born. And I live in Chicago. I don’t need a gun to feel safe.

My emotional reaction to the dorks is laughter. Bedwetters who think they “need” a gun to visit the grocery store are hilarious.

The GOP and the gun industry learned that millions of impressionable weak-minded dullards are a huge supply of free labor. By appealing to their fears of minorities and inadequacy, and playing to their action hero fantasies, they have fooled an army of wankers to vote and lobby their representatives based on their childish fears.

Comedy gold.

Emotional response on both sides of the debate are the problem. It will take educated, reasonable, decision making for something beneficial to emerge in gun control…

If it’s someone who seems to know what they are talking about, my response is, “shit, is the left wrong about some details, and making it easy for the gun people to completely dismiss valid arguments?”

Another thing that comes to my mind is none of these gun people have lived in a place that is basically void of gun talk, and gun activities. I “feel” more safe in the places void of that sort of talk, than the places that have tons of gun talk. The place I lived with the most talk about guns was Memphis, and their gun violence rate is high.

Michigan I knew people who went hunting, but none of my friends are what I would call “gun” people, or gun culture. Not even my girlfriend who grew up being able to hunt on her property. I really doubt she owns any sort of gun.

I feel somewhat sympathetic.

It’s not a simple bi-polar issue. I’m off-the-charts “left/progressive/green” if you try to graph most of my positions, and I am not “a gun person” though I know a fair amount about them, including some details of their tactical uses in combat, from realistic games and history books. I have never fired a real gun in my life and avoid them in reality, and dislike hunting wild animals and would rather a planeload of orphans and/or Mouseketeers crash into the ocean than a single member of an endangered species be poached. And yet I’m fairly neutral on the gun control issue and favor what many gun enthusiasts and also gun-control supporters suggest, which is just increased background/sanity/violent-crime-history checks and so on.

@JLeslie “shit, is the left wrong about some details, and making it easy for the gun people to completely dismiss valid arguments?”
– Yes. Much of the public conversation (especially online, but also frequently in the “professional” media about gun control is frequently uninformed, wrong, and/or exaggerated and inconsistent, which yes makes it very easy for gun fans or even gun-neutral-ish people like myself to find fault with the statements and proposals and therefore not agree in one way or another.

Even look at the language just in this thread. The message on what’s wanted isn’t clear and sounds like it could be all the way up to “let’s repeal the second amendment and take everyone’s guns that they already have away and make it illegal to have guns”. And the characterization of “the other side” is full of pretty extreme insults. Now, I agree some people are pretty crazy, annoying, or even GOP ;-P about guns, and all sorts of silly things are posted by them online, a fair amount of which is probably bait and fuel for the fire of a dysfunctional crazy bi-polar argument that gets nowhere good.

@Zaku Two things my gun friend’s point out over and over: 1. There is no such thing as an assault rifle. 2. You have to pull the trigger every time you want to fire an AR-15. But, recently I saw someone come back with, “there may not be a such thing as an assault rifle, but there is such a thing as an assault weapon.” I found that interesting. Does that little difference matter for the conversation? Is that accurate? I have no idea.

Also, I have seen people on the left literally say to gun people, I would even say accuse gun people, that they are happy Parkland happened so they can promote and sell guns. That’s incredibly offensive, and believe me my gun friends go into the defense mode when accused of not caring about those children. In their mind wanting guns in the hands of a teacher who is trained is to protect the children. They care about the children as much as anyone else.

My emotional response is “what the hell do you need a gun for. Yes, you can live without one”

There is no denying that there are decent well meaning people opposed to restrictions on firearms. And I understand the very reasonable argument that “I am responsible and diligent with my weapons. Why should I be deprived?” The gun argument boils down to another of those disputes over individual rights versus the well being of the overall society. As things stand, the great experiment is now underway. The NRA argument is that the society is better off when everyone is armed. While we are not (yet) at the stage where packin is compulsory, the pile of weapons in this country assures that ANYONE who wants a gun will have little trouble finding one. I listened to a junkie tell a cop that the only thing required to obtain a gun was to break into any 3 random vehicles. He then complained that the price he could fetch for a pistol was plummeting due to the glut.

@flutherother . I have stated this before. I will again, in case you missed it.

I sold guns part time for several years. It was part of the job at a large sporting goods store.

I was told by many women, that owning, or carrying a gun gave them their lives back. They were victims of rape, or domestic violence. They told me that they couldn’t sleep, or leave the house. But then, they took a course on gun safety, and purchased a firearm. Slowly, the confidence that they gained in their ability to protect themselves allowed them to live again. That tool is something that they couldn’t live without. It may seem odd to you, but the ability to protect yourself is a big deal to some.

I can imagine a world where nobody needs a gun to feel safe. But that isn’t this world…

Gun rights supporters are not equal to gun nuts. I react negatively to gun nuts because they give gun owners a bad name. I’m quite positive in response to gun rights.

@MrGrimm888 Generally speaking, I would think introducing a gun into a domestic violence situation would be a very bad idea.

Guns can protect people. I know a woman whose husband was abusive when he was intoxicated and often when he was not as well. Her son gave her a ,38 Special compact revolver. The next time her husband started to beat her, she drew the revolver and stopped him. After that, he did not dare to attack her again. One ight, her son awoke and saw a prowler looking in the drawers of his desk, so he drew his Walther pistol an the prowler fled. There are many more incidents in which guns stop crimes than there are murders. There are many deaths in automobile accidents, so by th reasoning of the anti-gun gang, cars should be banned. People who text while driving often have accidents, so we should bab telephones. A gun is just a tool that cn be used as the owner desires. Blaming it is comparable to blaming cars, telephones, etc. for tragedies. The strong can do as they like to weaker people, unless the weaker person has a gun. That equalizes them. It is horrible to want to try to ban such an equalizer.

@JLeslie “Two things my gun friend’s point out over and over: 1. There is no such thing as an assault rifle.”
– There are definitions of what “assault rifle” means. The form of the pro-gun-rights argument that makes sense to me and I think is the core comment, is that sloppy news reporting and anti-gun expressions often use that term inappropriately, making their arguments frustratingly broad and unclear to people who do know about guns. Actual assault rifles are either illegal or very restricted, and the weapons used in the killing sprees are not assault rifles, but the people calling for regulation use that term and say they want to ban them “like AR-15’s”, but an AR-15 is often an single-fire automatic rifle like most hunting rifles are, so it looks like such calls for bans are likely to ban most rifles.
Here’s a pretty good intro summary article on a few basic points such as that one: http://www.thefirearms.guide/blog/educational/assault-rifle

“2. You have to pull the trigger every time you want to fire an AR-15. But, recently I saw someone come back with, “there may not be a such thing as an assault rifle, but there is such a thing as an assault weapon.” I found that interesting. Does that little difference matter for the conversation? Is that accurate? I have no idea.”
– No, there is such a thing as an assault rifle, but mostly only the military or SWAT police are generally allowed to have them even in the USA. Both the above counter-arguments sound like confused pro-gun people adding to the misunderstanding. They may be incorrectly repeating what they’ve heard from more accurate people saying that practically no one in the USA legally has anything defined as an “assault weapon”, which would (in part) be defined as a firearm that has a firing mode where either you can hold down the trigger for continuous fire, or each time you pull the trigger it fires three bullets (which is what the US military mainly uses on its rifles).

There’s also the detail that it’s not all that difficult (though illegal) for someone to modify an automatic rifle to fire three rounds per trigger-pull.

However, it is also quite possible for someone with a standard automatic to fire single rounds per trigger-pull very quickly, and that will probably even tend to be more effective at hitting many targets in a short time.

The military stopped using full-auto rifles around 1979 IIRC because they get really inaccurate when fired that way. Even the 3-round burst military rifles generally get used in single-shot mode by the military when they’re trying to hit things rather than just suppress/scare enemies.

So although I sympathize somewhat with some gun rights sentiments, I think really the “assault rifle” arguments offered by gun rights advocates, even though when accurately stated it is a valid objection to the form of the anti-gun arguments, is also a bit of a distraction from the reality that practically any automatic rifle can be used to kill a lot of people in a short time.

@Zaku Thanks so much for that.

You sound like a disturbed individual. Gun rights are not ideas, they are real and grounded in the constitution. Why does that bother you? The fact that we have constitutional gun rights doesn’t hurt anyone.

^^Say that to the little girl shot randomly because a couple guys thought it was fun to shoot their guns “at nothing.” She was on her own property. Just google “accidental shot” and see how much comes up. I bet a lot of those people who fired the shot, not just those who were hurt, wished they hadn’t had a gun. Sometimes government needs to put some controls on things to keep society safe. I’m not talking about getting rid of the second amendment, but reasonable laws regarding guns make sense. The few countries that have a lot of guns, and low gun violence, have a shitload of laws and regulations.

@Jleslie Sure. I realize this morning though that I should have been more clear in my wording (particularly I should’ve used the term “semi-automatic”) in a few of places:

* “single-fire automatic” – I could more clearly have written single-fire semi-automatic or “semi-automatic (i.e. single-shot-per-trigger-pull)”.

* “to modify an automatic rifle” – I should have written “to modify a semi-automatic rifle”.

* “standard automatic” – I should’ve written “semi-automatic”

* “any automatic rifle” – I should’ve written “semi-automatic”