It’s surprisingly easy to imagine a society where gun ownership is looked down upon, if not scorned outright. This already happened with smoking, at least partly as a result of a public education campaign aimed at young people, and it happened when polite society finally came down against people flying the Confederate flag after the Charleston church shootings this year. Sometimes, when legislative action is difficult or downright impossible, a cultural approach works to curtail dangerous behaviors.In short, we can make gun ownership uncool
Source: What If We Made Gun Culture Uncool Like We Did Cigarettes?
Let’s begin with the obvious: The campaign to make gun ownership look not only uncool but retrograde has been going on for the past 30 years. Your side has almost unlimited access to major media outlets and Hollywood production companies that allow you to cast gun owners as dangerous, nasty, racist uncool,despicable….you get the idea.
Yet, after those many years, your side has failed miserably to achieve the goal of exorcise us from the American Culture. Why is that?
Because guns are fun. Gun owners are fun people. We have a ball when we get together to shoot our guns and even more when we bring new people into the culture.
You see? The Gun Control sub-culture is sad and angry. You offer nothing other than loud complaining and name calling and after a while, it gets tiresome and irritates the hell of the regular Joes and Janes. You take somebody to protest guns for the first time and they go home at the end of the day tired and feeling angry. That may work once or twice, but save some emotional masochist, regular folks decide that they had enough soon and seek more pleasurable alternatives.
When we take somebody shooting for the first time, they feel like they are being initiated in a strange and curious world that they only have some nasty reference (from you) about. But after we teaching them the fundamentals of shooting, rules of safety and how to act, they see it is nothing more than developing another skill like driving or rock climbing or wood carving. But the real magic is when they are finally facing the target downrange, they bring the gun up, probably with some trepidation and almost fear, press the trigger and hit that target.
They smile.
They smile because they conquered a new milestone. They smile because they tamed something maybe a couple of hours ago they thought they would never do. They smile because even when they had been bombarded by propaganda about how they would die if they ever touched a gun, they are still alive.
And they smile because it is darn fun.
And it is right there when our side wins. Even if that person never shoots a gun again, whatever crap is that your side has been pushing against us gets identified as lies. And nobody likes or trust a liar.
And if you do not believe me? Check the face of one of the biggest advocates of Gun Control in this country in this picture:
That would not happen to be a smile in the face of Senator Chuck Schummer, would it?
Absolutely and Amen!!
Agreed, they are fun.
Practical people also recognize that the police are not always there (e.g. for criminals, unrest, disasters) to protect them and their property. They may rarely go to the range for big grins, but they do sleep better at night.
They also tried to make Marijuana culture uncool for a generations, with little to no success.
Yet dopes are still dopes.
That has a lot to do with it ,as gun owners we fight against ignorance of the gun,and the anti’s fight to make people ignorant of the gun.
This is why every state and county fair has a shooting gallery, not a sitting around gallery. Shooting Is Fun.
and even the most psychotic anti-guns play violent video games where you run around shooting people. Because shooting is fun.
I’d like to see anti-gun logic applied to Call of Duty or Halo.
Well said, and it IS fun!!! 🙂 And crosses all political and ethnic boundaries…
But remember, the gun banning politicians are those who want to take from others what they keep for themselves. It’s a criminal mindset, except their purpose is tyranny. Why else is it that with their gun laws they always EXEMPT THEMSELVES.
Laws containing exemptions for politicians should be illegal, politicians should be paid an amount equal to the GDP of the region they’re in charge of divided by the total population of that region(not the average pay, which would allow pulling funny tricks with minimum wage), and should not be provided with any sort of retirement plan. If they’re going to be messing with our lives, they should have to deal with the consequences.
“No-one is above the code. Especially the king.” -Dragonheart
I like that plan!
…and it happened when polite society finally came down against people flying the Confederate flag after the Charleston church shootings this year.
Ah yes. They politely screamed “racist!” at anyone flying the confederate flag.
The cultural war on guns has been going on for a long time, in the greater context of the cultural elites demonizing anything to do with the South, the Midwest, or Texas.
Schumer is smiling because he’s imagining using the gun in all the dangerous and criminal ways he believes he’d use it – the same behavior he (and others like him) project upon law-abiding gun owners. They see us as a threat because they know that their ownership of firearms would end in disaster, because liberal culture demands immediate satisfaction with minimal self-control.
That element of projection is disturbing. Just how many of them are as crazy as they claim we are? Quite a few, I think, as indicated by the ideology of most mass shooters.
Now, I believe that a person has the right to defend his life, his loved ones, and his possessions from those who would seek to deprive him or her of the same, but I sometimes catch myself morally conflicted about the mere existence and purpose of firearms and flip flop between wishing that either 1. Firearms were erased from all of space and time, and 2. I had the seemingly wanton enthusiasm of the oft-stereotyped “gun nut”. Has this happened to anyone else? How do you cope? Not looking to ruffle any feathers here, just trying to gain an outside perspective.
1. Firearms were erased from all of space and time.
Not gonna happen any time soon. That genie left the bottle some 600 years ago.
2. I had the seemingly wanton enthusiasm of the oft-stereotyped “gun nut”
Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies. 😀
I had no problems adapting. I come from a country where Gun Control is not a possible social experiment, but a fully activated one and with horrible consequences. And to boot, the government uses the high crime to keep the masses under control: If they are too scared about losing their lives, they do not have time or inclination for social change, specially if they are disarmed.
I do not want that crap to happen here, period.
“Firearms were erased from all of space and time”
Why do you hate your mother, sister, and daughters so? Only those who do not know the living condition of the weak, the elderly, the minority prior to the invention of guns would wish so.
They lived at the mercy of the strong, the powerful, the ones who controlled many warriors. Japan outlawed all firearms many centuries ago when the ruling class found out that a pistol made any peasant the equal of a trained Samurai, who up until then had the right to dispatch said peasant at any time for any reason that seemed good enough to him.
Prior to the 1800s there were basically three kinds of people… Those who preyed on people, those strong enough to offer protection from human predators to others (for a price of course) and those weak enough to need protection from human predators. Often those offering protection and those making people need protection were the same people.
Women were basically fair game for any who could get away with heinous acts. My wife is not fair game for anyone. Neither are my daughters. They have guns and know how to use them. They don’t have to rely upon someone stronger who will exact his own price for their “protection.”
[…] The real problem our opposition has is that shooting is a fun and safe activity. […]