How a Gun Dealer Sees It - New Yorker Magazine
He also debunks rather thoroughly the notion that there are often, or even ever, occasions when carrying a loaded, concealed weapon is likely to make an actual difference in a confrontation; when they do take place, it’s difficult for even a trained policeman to hit anything reliably. Above all, he points out how wildly improbable it is that such confrontations would regularly happen, as widely debunked pro-gun studies claim, and play out in ways that would make guns useful. “We train to drive cars safely because we know that if we don’t drive properly there’s a good chance we could get killed every time we get behind the wheel of a car. But nobody really imagines that if they walk down the street without their gun that it’s going to make much of a difference. Most people who aren’t criminals but like to carry a gun simply enjoy the fact that they can do it; that it’s there; that I can put my hand in my pocket and instead of wrapping my fingers around my key chain, can wrap it around my gun.”
Impressed by his book, I got Weisser on the phone and asked him where, exactly, he came down on the issues of new laws and preventive practices. He emphasized two points. First, the gap between gun owners and non-owning gun talkers is “immense.” “Here’s the bottom line—roughly thirty to forty per cent of the households in America have guns, mostly from habit and convenience. The degree to which gun ownership is a familial thing is overwhelming. If you don’t own a gun, and don’t have a family background in which it’s part of life, you’re totally clueless in terms of what guns mean to the people who own them,” he said. As a result, gun-control advocates “have no idea what guns are about on any level, and are seen by people who owns guns as, at best, a nuisance.” He’s in favor of what he sees as the right kind of gun control—he accepts that the best way to have less gun violence is to have fewer guns—but believes that enforcement is vastly more difficult than it seems. “There is nothing that makes any real change without aggressive enforcement, and this is where the whole issue of gun control collapses. … Laws on seat belts worked because they were aggressively enforced. I don’t see any discussion of gun control level with the issue of enforcement.”
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