Thoughts on the Gun Control Debate

In the wake of the school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, the ongoing national debate on gun control has flared up with a vengeance, everywhere from the 24-hour news networks to late night talk shows. Where I have noticed it most poignantly is on the social networking sites I frequent, where the discussion has quickly become vehement and personal. I am not going to come down on one side or the other of the debate here, except to note that I do believe a non-absolute right to own weapons has an important place in a free society. I have, however, been struck by what I consider to be very disturbing behavior from some other people in favor of gun ownership, and do want to share some observations about it.

* People posting in favor of gun ownership tend to be much less articulate than those posting against it. This is somewhat ironic, in that many of them explicitly or implicitly express a fear of minorities as their motivation for owning guns, because based only on their writing most people would assume many of them were members of the most illiterate, uneducated, and despised inner city minority populations. People who can only express themselves in broken pidgin English are products of some sort of cultural or intellectual degeneration and, whatever battle they are trying to win, they have already lost through their inability to clearly and fluently express themselves.

* The vast majority of people posting in favor of gun ownership identify themselves as conservative or Republican, and complain about the "liberals" that want to take their guns away from them. In point of fact, however, some of the most heavily armed people I personally know are liberals, Democrats, or even Greens, and in favor of laws that permit gun ownership -- but, for whatever reasons, they choose not to rant about it publicly.

* People posting in favor of gun ownership are much quicker than others to engage in emotional violence, profanity, incoherent rants, explicit or implicit threats, WRITING IN ALL CAPS TO SIMULATE YELLING, and other forms of intimidation. Plus, they have guns, too, right? Hahaha! What a way to come off as a complete, dangerous nut and end any kind of meaningful discussion.

* Individuals posting in favor of gun ownership seem to have an unhealthy fixation on firearms. Why is it no one posts pictures of their hammer collections, raves about their new socket wrench sets, or viciously attacks others who might dislike a particular brand of pliers? Guns are tools like any other and mentally stable people treat them as such, making sure they know how to use them, pulling them out when required, and not making big play of using them as needed.

* People posting about gun ownership tend to have a very poor sense of what we used to call OPSEC, or "operational security," when I was in the military, and publicly disclose a lot of information about their personal arsenals. In that almost all of them express fear of something as a reason for owning guns -- blacks, liberals, the federal government, the President of the United States, "Mexicans," Russians, U.N. black helicopters, whatever -- this is all the more baffling, because they are giving all those enemy peoples great intelligence that could presumably be used against them. And, in that many have collections that are not altogether legal, they have presumably put themselves on the radar of the governmental agencies they least want to be known to.

Comments are welcome from anyone who is a follower of this site and who posted under a real name! Anonymity and cowardice are not acceptable here, whether you own a gun or not.