re: #118 Rightwingconspirator

?! Looked like it to me. I said “sound as if”. That’s telling you how it sounded to me. That is not making anything up. And that’s not the first time your choice of words gave me that impression. When I include a caveat you should include its intent in reading my words. You’ll get upset less often at me.

But it doesn’t sound like that, at all. You just made that up.

“Exposing as many people to it as possible.” Yes, in general. Gun ranges advertise. And that’s the goal of those advertisements. Just had good people re do the website where I have an interest. Yes, we’d like to expose as many people to it, that way we hope they can each assess whether it’s for them. I might have linked it here in the past. Try not to take that as some kind of hyper evangelizing, as that’s not my intent. It’s just ordinary promotion of a family friendly sport. Some of us have a lot of enthusiasm and talk it up. Its really not harmful.

We’re not talking about gun ranges advertising, we’re talking about the author’s assertion that all law-abiding gun owners should be trying to introduce as many people as possible to the firearms community. And I really do think that one way that gun enthusiasts hugely, hugely, horribly fall down is precisely in the “leave it up to them to decide if they’re into it” thing. As I said, my boxing coach encouraged us to only bring people to class who would be at a (pretty high) minimum of maturity and responsibility. Gun advocates have a really unfortunate tendency to go miles out of their way to admit that many ordinary people shouldn’t own guns because they’re not responsible enough.

I think that DF has the right of it, and the unfortunate identity politics of gun owners, identifying as part of the ‘firearms community’, is what drives the evangelization.