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Tuesday, February 05, 2013

It's Gun-Nuttery All the Way Down

Prioritizing a "right" elaborated nowhere in the Constitution of a minority of gun-owners -- however "nice" they assure us they are and may be -- to hoard private arsenals of military weapons and hardware, OVER the defining Constitutional values of domestic tranquility, common defense, and general welfare asserted in the explicit justification of its preamble actually isn't reasonable. It isn't non-nutty. Gun-nuts are always whining about being vilified as gun-nuts even when they are not as completely off the rails themselves as the mass-shooters they enable as the price for their continued enjoyment of their little hobby. It's actually quite easy to imagine common sense policies banning weapons with no legitimate private uses that are demonstrated threats to public safety while otherwise providing for a regime of testing, tracking, licensing, and compulsory insurance for the comparatively safer and legitimate private uses of guns for hunting, safety, sport, collecting, and so on. Even if you are perfectly law-abiding yourself, but are unwilling to accept reasonable limitations on the ownership and operation of military hardware, however high the bloody body-pile rises from criminal uses of that hardware then, sorry, you're a nut, too. We should stop coddling assholes and reassuring them that their paranoid fantasies matter more than the lives lost and damaged by the lack of effective safety regulation and oversight over private arsenals. Why should they define so many of the terms of this debate in which they hold a marginal view? Why do the rights of citizens like me -- who don't own guns and don't like guns -- not to get shot in random gun violence enabled by minorities who do own guns and like them a lot so rarely frame discussions over "gun rights"? Why do we endlessly collaborate in the pretension that the much vaunted "law-abiding gun-owner" isn't actually expressing priorities skewed to the point of sociopathy?

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

American gun politics are impenetrably weird to outsiders.

I lived in Seattle for three years and I met a lot of gun owners that I couldn't figure out. One of my business associates left a loaded 9mm pistol in our offices unlocked reception area. When I found out I freaked out at him, and he advised me that he did that every time he visited. He couldn't comprehend why I would object to him bringing in a loaded firearm into my office and leaving it lying around.