An old friend of mine has come down on the right side of the whole gun control argument. That is “right” as in “not left”. He posted a cartoon to his FB wall that made the whole situation just far too simplistic. 
I called him on it. Another right-sided friend of his engaged me on the topic, but he was not as extreme as you usually find in these debates. I let him say his piece and we parted ways amicably.
A day or so later, the new editor of a small magazine (nothing fancy, it is about a half-step above a ‘zine) in CT that I used to write the occasional article for stumbled upon the conversation and tried to woo us to come continue the talk on his web site. My first words in this whole simplistic comic thing were that I didn’t really want to get into it. And I really didn’t. I explained to him that I didn’t. Then he sent me a private message asking me to please move the conversation to his site. I started to explain to him why I didn’t want to do that, and soon the dam broke. The little FB PM window was not big enough for the answer I was giving him, so I banged it out in Word and then copied it to him. What follows is that.
Well, except for the part where I said that I didn’t really want to get into it and did not mention that I absolutely believe that assault weapons should not be available to civilians and that high-capacity magazines should be made illegal today. And that all gun owners should be subjected to random spot checks to ensure that the weapons are being stored in a safe fashion. And that gun ownership should be publicly available information. Did you see that piece from Westchester County, NY? That is a hell of a lot of potentially armed people in just a couple of towns! I guess it already is sort of publicly available, but it really only shows the licensed people, not the individual guns that they own, if any. And does this loose collection of armed civilians constitute a “well regulated militia” as described in the Second Amendment? I think not. Well-armed, yes. Well organized and regulated? Not even a little.
Or, or the part where I thought that the NRA and its members are just another bunch of xenophobic, small-minded hypocrites with a false sense of machismo that developed from watching Charles Bronson in “Death Wish” too many times. Quite honestly, I find them to mostly be deluded dupes of right-wing propaganda.
In short, that guy did not sway me one bit. I still think that the current reading of the Second Amendment is way too broad (thanks, again, Scalia) and this country has far too many guns for its own good. You want a hunting rifle? Sure. You want a hunting shotgun? Fine. Hell, I’ll even give you a six-shot maximum revolver to take care of the whole ”sidearm as last resort” issue. But the rest of it? Come on. Get real. No member of the GP needs the amount of firepower that we are seeing being used in these rampages. The nation is no longer dependent on the GP to protect it against invasion from Canada, Mexico, Spain, England or the Apaches. Wait. We invaded a couple of those nations! With units made up of militias! What were they armed with? Single-shot, slow to reload muskets. I am not a gun or military historian, but I think rifled barrels were just coming into use during the US-Mexico War, but the rifle as we know it today didn’t come along for a few more years.
And that whole “non-gun owners need to learn more about guns before we can have this conversation” argument? By the same logic, I would like anyone without sufficient knowledge of switching, routing and the TCP/IP stack in general to keep their mouth shut about the Internet. At the very least, you should have to know something of HTTP and should be able to demonstrate such knowledge by coding a simple, static “Hello, world!” page in Notepad. You see? Not going to happen. People who like guns tend to learn about guns. People who like computers tend to learn about computers. People who like cars tend to learn about cars. People who like cooking tend to learn about cooking. I don’t expect people without such interests to be able to discuss the finer details of such topics. If my mom tells me her Internet is acting funny, I don’t expect her to know a damn thing about an ARP table or how her ISP connects to the Internet backbone routers via BGP. So I don’t expect the average non-gun owner to know the difference between a semi-automatic assault-style rifle and a fully automatic assault rifle. It doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn! In the end, you still have a pile of dead kindergarteners. Or movie-goers. Or college students. Or soldiers on a military base.
And, we never really did get around to addressing the mental health services end of the equation. We never do. While level-headed and even tempered, that guy kept the focus of the conversation on the guns. It was civil because I kept it civil and did not force him into deeper waters. The conversation is important to have, but it is not going to be fixed on someone’s Facebook wall while discussing a cartoon.
See? I didn’t want to get into it.