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i think alot of your relation to gun control is directly tied to where you live and whether you grew up with guns or not.
i live in chicago and have lived in cities most of my life: i also grew up in a family that had no particular interest in hunting. when my relatives would once in a while "go hunting" what it usually meant was that they would go to our cabin in northern new hampshire, drink alot of beer and play ping pong. once in a while, some intrepid soul would decide that actually going outside was a good idea, occasionally with a weapon in hand, and that it was more likely they would find something interesting to shoot at if they ventured further than the outhouse, and so they would do that. from what i understand, they mostly ended up shooting arrows into trees.
anyway i find it difficult to not support gun control in urban spaces. whaddya need a gun for in a city? to go hunting? what are you going to hunt: other people?
on the other hand, i know alot of folk who grew up in more rural areas in families that were interested in and in some cases quite devoted to hunting, for example. these folk have an entirely different understanding of guns and different positions on gun control. knowing these folk and talking to them at length about this has caused me to become more agnostic on the matter of gun control in general--that is controls that would apply equally everywhere.
there are also folk who seem to think that the only way they know they are politically free is if they have a gun. this is separate--some of these folk used to be associated with the black helecopter set--you know, the folk who thought the us was being invaded secretly by the united nations, which would whizz its troops around in black helicopters. the reportings of sightings of the mysterious black helicopters was at one point a variant of bird watching. i used to really enjoy listening to the shortwave radio talkshows they would call into to "report"...great stuff. the idea was that the united nations, an extension of the "world jewish conspiracy" at one level or another, wanted to take away "our guns" and thereby "reduce us to slavery." these folk tend to argue that any form of gun control is a blow against political freedom. i tend to see these people are crazy. they tend to see me as a commie. so we both get to use words that end in the "y" sound across pointless non-conversations.
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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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