How A Gun Dealer Sees It

By artappraiser on Sat, 11/23/2013 - 1:16am |

By Adam Gopnik, Daily Comment @ newyorker.com, Nov. 21, 2013

[....] Those of us who have been arguing the case for gun control are so used to the non-responsive response—School buses plunge into ravines and kill people, sometimes! Why don’t you want to ban school buses?—that it’s a real pleasure to find a response rooted in the actual experience of guns and gun owners. It’s good to talk to someone who knows what he’s talking about. As it happens, a book written from a pro-gun, or at least a professional, perspective arrived on my desk the other day. Called “Guns For Good Guys; Guns For Bad Guys,” it is by Michael R. Weisser, a.k.a. Mike the Gun Guy, who owns a gun shop in Massachusetts and blogs about guns for the Huffington Post.

Weisser is truthful about guns and gun violence in ways that underline the essentially cultural, or symbolic, if you like, nature of the practices involved [....]

URL:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/11/how-a-gun-dealer-sees-it.html

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He also debunks rather thoroughly the notion that there are often, or even ever, occasions when carrying a loaded, concealed weapon is likely to make an actual difference in a confrontation; when they do take place, it’s difficult for even a trained policeman to hit anything reliably.

Unless you are the only one carrying a gun ...

by Donal on Sat, 11/23/2013 - 7:47am

Of course, we have to deal with our constitutional peculiarity. The founders protected guns, at least in a certain context, because having them was the difference between independence and not (among other realities, many self-inflicted, of colonial and frontier life).

I wonder what the Constitution would look like if, back when it was written, we had also had cars and computers? I could see those objects as also being essential to the revolution. Imagine an amendment keeping the Feds out of our laptops!

But, they had guns and that historical accident has made guns unmanageable. Not only does the second amendment make guns unique among objects that people can own in a legal sense, it provides the foundation for gun fetishism.

It's a trap!

by Michael Maiello on Sat, 11/23/2013 - 9:36pm

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