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wow--this is quite a thread.
i looked through it because, while i am relcutant to participate in these debates, i am interested nonetheless--my positions about gun control had shifted as a function of some more measured debates on this that have happened in politics---but this particular thread seems to have veered off into some curious militia group haze.
so let me get this straight...
over the last page or so, this is effectively what i saw:
try to take "our guns" and the result will be worse than civil war---anarchy, the war of all against all resulting in lives that are nasty brutish and short....
nice, folks.
the assumption behind the emphasis on law abiding gun owners in rural contexts primarily in arguments against any form of gun control works when the assumption that these folk are sane also works. and in general, there is no reason to think otherwise.
but in this thread, there is reason to think otherwise: the arguments against gun control that depart from a threat of wholesale, indiscriminate killing as a response are sociopathic.
they make the worst possible case for your position because they allow for a pathologizing of gun ownership---which i assume is a point that you who advance these positions are trying to counter. so i do not see what you imagine yourselves to be accomplishing by heading down this path.
i do not personally like guns.
i do not accept the argument that they make you free or anything else--any more than owning a gas grille makes you a physicist.
i live in a city and have lived in cities for many years--i fully support the right of localities to control guns in principle and would actively support gun control in urban spaces.
the shift in my position is in that--i have come to understand that what guns signify in an urban environment is particular. so any controls should be enacted at the local level.
but i have to say that had i come to this thread wondering about how to modify my position on the matter, it would have hardened the other way.
i hope these represent a very small minority view.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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