Hi Joe. I think most of what you said is pretty reasonable. I don’t necessarily agree with your views, but some of this is stuff reasonable people could debate. And I wish we could have a reasonable discussion about it (and many other issues here, by which i mean Boing Boing, The United States, etc), but at the moment, the Overton window is being slammed so hard to the right by people with infinite resources that it can feel like any attempt at reasonable discussion is ceding ground to the assholes. And it feels like an existential crisis (one of many), so people push back as hard as they are able.
To give an example close to my heart, my Dad was an American Baptist Minister (by way of differentiating from the organization of Southern Baptist Ministers). He was a great guy. He was always trying to help people in need, he started a halfway house, he helped organize the immigration of Hmong refugees, and he was pro-science, an amateur paleontologist & geologist.
Even with that background, when I hear someone calling themselves a Christian these days, my initial response is suspicion. Christianity in the US has been so co-opted by politics, racism, misogyny and institutional abuse that as a survival impulse, I have to step back and do some cold calculation.
So, while I believe that you personally have had a healthy and happy relationship with owning guns, gun ownership has been so-co-opted by bad actors that the only sane response from me (and I suspect other on these forums) varies from a cold suspicion to hot rejection of your approach. Too little, too late.
Here’s my issue with the notion of the Responsible Gun Owner. Say this guy bought this gun 5 years ago, and when he did he was a healthy, happy member of society. So what happened? Was he spiraling this day on social-media fueled fear? Maybe he has early stage Alzheimer’s? Maybe he just had a really bad day? We don’t know. Whatever the actual circumstances, he had access to a machine that could end another human life in a split-second, no undo.
So, background checks are great, let’s do that. But it doesn’t address the fact that there is absolutely no way to predict future outcomes when you sell someone the Death Button. We just have to sit back and hope that they never push the Death Button, even on their worst day.
Some of our days have been pretty bad of late. That hasn’t been working out well for us, IMO.
