re: #19 Rightwingconspirator

I could not answer your question above about the wingnuts gun habits without speculating about them.

It is really improbable that these letters are all coming from irresponsible gun owners, though. Being a responsible gun owner doesn’t mean that you can’t also be a raving paranoid whackaloon.

And since Skip did not reference the NRA I see no tie to that definition. Of course one would normally give a gun owner the same benefit of the doubt we give car owners. Once taught the safety and operation, and after some practice- that’s a responsible driver until they drive irresponsibly. Same as a gun owner or user.

Er, that is the NRA definition.

How about this-Please. Just refrain from lumping the good with the bad because we have guns. The only thing stopping me from giving this a +1 is the subtitle and or it’s lack of a sarc tag. I’d rather work with reasonable critics together for universal registration etc., than argue over rhetoric from them or the NRA.

But that is the point. The good and the bad are lumped together, because they have guns, to the extent that they make up the community of people who have guns— and I’m just talking about people who own them legally.

This goes back to the previous conversation that you bailed out on: The ‘firearms community’, like any interest community, contains the bad as well as the good. Part of what I am trying to change in gun culture is the attitude that owning a gun or not is a purely personal decision that nobody should ever criticize; instead, the firearm ‘community’, or at the least experienced teachers, sellers of guns, etc., should dissuade people from owning guns who, while fitting the technical legal definition to own them, aren’t going to be truly responsible owners. In addition, people who think they need a gun for self defense based on inaccurate ideas about the frequency of home invasions and the utility to them of a gun in one should be disabused of that notion.