I definitely think your feelings towards guns are a matter of your personal/family culture. My personal/family culture is very different from yours so I'm fine with the idea of people owning guns or carrying concealed. (Although the people bringing assault rifles into Target are just being juvenile and in-your-face about something that really shouldn't be a big deal - and isn't a big deal in other parts of the country where people have guns, we all know they have them, and no one feels the need to flash them around.)
And I'd argue that how you view the "context" of the current gun issues in this country also depends on what parts of the country you "tend to think of" when you're framing your arguments. There are still places in this country where you absolutely need a gun because help really is that far away. Or your luck is really that monumentally bad. And there are socioeconomic levels/pockets in the U.S. where people actually do still mostly survive off of what they can hunt/kill. They can't afford to do anything else.
(Although I read an academic paper awhile back positing that it's not the access to guns - because we've always had that - but something that's gone wrong in our culture that's responsible for the current mess in the U.S.. The writer had recently visited (and observed in) a couple of modern, well-populated countries that have an average of as many as one gun for every three people, and those countries simply don't have our levels of gun violence. ONE of those countries had had ONE police shooting in the ENTIRE history of their country and EVERYONE even tangentially involved in the affair was given counseling at the government's expense because it was such a terrible and abhorrent thing in their culture. That the gun-flailing suspect had later DIED had the nation collectively breathing into a paper bag. The writer contrasted that with New York's police, who will absolutely shoot into a crowd of unarmed civilians at a fleeing suspects - and, at the time of the writing, there had been two such incidents within a single week.
But, assuming that the paper-writer was right, there MAY be something between the tendency of some people to ostentatiously flail and flash their weapons and the current amounts and types of gun violence in various parts of the U.S.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-07-11 07:06 pm (UTC)And I'd argue that how you view the "context" of the current gun issues in this country also depends on what parts of the country you "tend to think of" when you're framing your arguments. There are still places in this country where you absolutely need a gun because help really is that far away. Or your luck is really that monumentally bad. And there are socioeconomic levels/pockets in the U.S. where people actually do still mostly survive off of what they can hunt/kill. They can't afford to do anything else.
(Although I read an academic paper awhile back positing that it's not the access to guns - because we've always had that - but something that's gone wrong in our culture that's responsible for the current mess in the U.S.. The writer had recently visited (and observed in) a couple of modern, well-populated countries that have an average of as many as one gun for every three people, and those countries simply don't have our levels of gun violence. ONE of those countries had had ONE police shooting in the ENTIRE history of their country and EVERYONE even tangentially involved in the affair was given counseling at the government's expense because it was such a terrible and abhorrent thing in their culture. That the gun-flailing suspect had later DIED had the nation collectively breathing into a paper bag. The writer contrasted that with New York's police, who will absolutely shoot into a crowd of unarmed civilians at a fleeing suspects - and, at the time of the writing, there had been two such incidents within a single week.
But, assuming that the paper-writer was right, there MAY be something between the tendency of some people to ostentatiously flail and flash their weapons and the current amounts and types of gun violence in various parts of the U.S.)