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I grew up in the deep Ozarks backwoods on a subsistence farm located in the Mark Twain National Forest. From the age of six, I was trained to use firearms, and was not allowed to leave the house unless I carried one. To us, guns were tools. We used them to defend ourselves from snakes, wild dogs, coyotes, and rabid foxes. We used them to obtain a goodly portion of our food. Everyone owned one, and they were as indispensable to us as cell phones are to urbanites. They were treated with great respect, and accidental shootings were far less common than deaths from texting and driving are today.
When I was twelve years old, my family moved to a small city, and I learned an entirely new way of looking at guns. In the city, the only people who carried guns were criminals and police officers. The only time they were used was to injure or kill people. Herein lies the vast gulf which separates rural America from city-dwellers.
Urbanites see guns as weapons. Country folk see them as tools. If the government decided that too many people were dying because of social media bullying and outlawed your cell phone and computers, you’d be outraged. This is how farmers and ranchers feel about outlawing firearms. But, curiously enough, they are not the most vocal advocates of 2nd Amendment rights. Enter the Suburban Gun Hobbyist.
These folks are the most numerous and vocal members of the National Rifle Association (NRA). They are typically middle-class homeowners who collect firearms as a hobby, and spend as much time at shooting ranges as our president spends on the golf course. They may own dozens or even hundreds of various types of guns. They contribute large sums of money to the NRA, and are mostly white males with a decidedly right-wing bias in politics and culture. They are, however, rarely dangerous to the public at large. That distinction belongs to the Gun Enthusiast.
The Gun Enthusiast is usually a working-class white male who can be socially isolated and, unlike the Suburban Gun Hobbyist, is not attracted to guns by their collectibility or capacity for hitting targets 300 yards away. He likes guns because they represent the ultimate in personal power. The power to kill. These people do not spend a lot of time at firing ranges. Instead, they seek out paramilitary camps where they are trained in using guns as weapons. They don’t buy single-shot target rifles. They buy AR-15’s and AK-47’s with extra magazines and hundreds of bullets to put in them. They are often paranoid, anti-social, and reclusive.
Finally, I’d like to address the Urban/Suburban Home Defense Gun Owner. I’m talking here about people who buy weapons to use defensively, but don’t use them for anything else. They buy guns because they are afraid and want to feel protected. Unfortunately, few are well trained, and since they weren’t raised using firearms, they often do not have the “safety conscience” which becomes habitual in people who were. They are far more likely to be a victim of a firearm accident than of an intruder. A subset of this group, the Concealed Weapon Carrier, is becoming very common as well, and the same safety caveats apply to most of them.
Of course, these are broad generalizations, but I’m trying to illuminate the various attitudes of different kinds of gun owners. Not all of us are right-wing anti-government paranoiacs. Many, like myself, have been life-long social justice activists. The narratives today are being manipulated by extremists at both ends of the political spectrum.
On the Right, the NRA and the alt-right media are trying to convince gun owners that a left-wing government takeover is imminent (I know, right?), and UN troops will soon be parachuting in to take our guns and enslave us to a Socialist State. On the Left, there is a thrust to outlawing all firearms a la Great Britain or Australia. The problem with that approach is the 2nd Amendment. European countries and Australia had no constitutional protections for owning firearms. We do.
There are two ways of interpreting the phrase “A well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free State”. On the one hand, it is thought to mean that keeping and bearing arms is tied directly to membership in a well-regulated militia. This has not been the interpretation historically accepted by the courts. Instead, the accepted concept is that, because a standing army is necessary, but also a threat to individual liberty, the citizenry must be allowed to bear arms to defend themselves from tyranny. Therefore, in the minds of Rightists, if you want to infringe on their right to keep and bear arms, it is because you are trying to establish Totalitarian rule. That makes you an enemy of the free State. Get it?
Beyond that, there is that troublesome little phrase, “shall not be infringed”, which has been accepted to mean that even moderate controls on ownership are constitutionally suspect. The case law is heavily weighted toward ownership rights, and against any kind of strict controls. The current administration has packed the lower courts with conservative judges, and this is likely going to complicate matters even further. In other words, it’s an uphill climb. Bans on high-capacity magazines and military-style weapons have been successful in the past, but going there again may not be as easy as one might hope.
Economic pressure on manufacturers and importers (most AR and AK weapons are imported) is the best option. In order to accomplish this, you’ll need the help of the people who buy guns. There are plenty of folks like myself who own and use firearms that believe no one outside of the military should own one of these weapons. If we can convince these people to boycott companies that distribute these weapons, we may have found an end-run around these issues.
Reducing imports could also go a long way toward reducing the availability of these weapons. Over 60% of assault weapons sold in the U.S. are made in other countries. An American made assault rifle retails for $1,500 to $3,500. A Chinese import can be bought for $450 new in the box. Reducing imports could be accomplished with tariffs and import bans, which are not vulnerable to constitutional challenges.
There are things we can do, but we need to drop the political and social narratives and start looking at the facts on the ground, and looking at one another as fellow parents rather than as mortal enemies.
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