What Both Sides Don’t Get About American Gun Culture (Politico)

Subtitled: Nice piece of both-siderism, by AUSTIN SARAT and JONATHAN OBERT /s

Amid the horrors of a mass shooting, it’s easy to forget that guns are social glue—and gun control efforts that don’t account for that will fail.

“Societal glue.”

The view of guns as neutral tools, a view shared by conservative defenders of gun rights as well as liberal advocates of gun regulation, misses a crucial fact about guns and gun ownership. It wrongly assumes that the distribution of guns and their presence in their owners’ lives are a totally independent facts that don’t shape the opportunities and choices of the people who use them.

This is bulkshyte. I don’t know any liberal (anecdotes are not data however) who thinks of guns as “tools.” They think of them as dangerous machines which must always be respected for their ability to cause mayhem and death if misused.

My “opportunities and choices” are not shaped by owning a shotgun. They were shaped by a lifetime of experience, good and bad. A shotgun is merely a deadly object I possess if I do not use it properly.