Facebook flog - Jul 9 2014

[blogfloggery.livejournal.com]

Link: Jul 9 2014, 19:46
Disclaimer: This blog entry is verbatim, as originally posted on LKH's Facebook. Copyright belongs to Ma Petite Enterprises.

Target showing first hits for new guns. Jon may have won me to .45 ACP at long last.

Comments

[subtle-shades.livejournal.com]

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.)

[deadsong.livejournal.com]

...you might be making some assumptions about my personal/family culture that are incorrect. I live in Chicago now. I didn't always. I grew up in one of those places where we hunted and killed for a living, and my parents are both ex-cops who keep guns in their respective houses. I was raised to shoot a gun; to respect a gun; to respect others in relation to my possession of a firearm. The fact that I choose not to own one now has nothing to do with the culture of family and other values that shaped me, even if my culture in a more strict sense of the word is very not-American. (Not white, socialized in a non-white household that brought in a lot of cultural values from other countries, including a complete confusion as to why anyone would need a gun if it wasn't for their absolute survival or their line of work. For every first-world country you cited with a large number of guns per capita, there are just as many that do fine without and just don't understand the obsession.) And while at the moment, yes, I am thinking of Chicago as far as what sticks out in my mind the most--for the most part I think of it in a national context and as a cultural epidemic.

But I'm also aware it's a personal preference. I'm not advocating to take away people's guns or whatever, just because I don't like them. You don't need to convince me of anything, because I'm not standing in opposition to you, and as I said " I know there's nothing wrong with practicing with firearms recreationally, or being fascinated by the various types of firearms, their design, their history." That also extends to guns as a necessity for survival. I'm just saying that her posting this--on the heels of the Texas shooting--shows a remarkable lack of awareness and raises some issues that make me feel ill.

It is definitely a symptom that something has gone very wrong with our collective culture as a nation. And it won't be fixed until we fix that, instead of just trying to take guns out of the hands of people who would do horrible things with or without them anyway.

[subtle-shades.livejournal.com]

I think that my assumption - that we have different personal/family cultures - still stands. Based on what you've said, literally the only thing we have in common is growing up in multicultural families that owned guns and taught us the very basics of using them. (Although I find your assumption that "American" = "white" troublesome... as is your assumption that it's uncommon to grow up in a mixed culture household. But then, that's my own background peeking through.)

...and I wasn't actually trying to convince you of anything. I put more effort into arguments/persuasive pieces. I thought it was an interesting tidbit and was sharing it.

But otherwise I probably agree with you?

[deadsong.livejournal.com]

I don't think American = white. I phrased that poorly, and for that I'm sorry. I've been talking white privilege with one of my friends all day, and talking about racism and the continued divide between white Americans and non-white Americans, plus the varying forms racism takes among non-white Americans themselves--and some of my train of thought probably crept into this inadvertently and led to some muddled phrasing.

We do have very different personal / family cultures; my only disagreement is with your assumption that the culture I come from drives my current discomfort with guns. (And I mean "culture" as in environment more than anything to do with ethnicity or country of origin.) But otherwise, yeah, we're pretty much agreeing. It's more a "live and let live" thing, anyway.