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. ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net\/hphotos-snc6\/282862_469506279775024_1266494907_n.png\")
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwell regulated militia\u201d as described in the Second Amendment? I think not. Well-armed, yes. Well organized and regulated? Not even a little.
\nOr, 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 \u201cDeath Wish\u201d too many times. Quite honestly, I find them to mostly be deluded dupes of right-wing propaganda.
\nIn 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\u2019ll even give you a six-shot maximum revolver to take care of the whole \u201dsidearm as last resort\u201d 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\u2019t come along for a few more years.
\nAnd that whole \u201cnon-gun owners need to learn more about guns before we can have this conversation\u201d 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 \u201cHello, world!\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t matter a tinker\u2019s damn! In the end, you still have a pile of dead kindergarteners. Or movie-goers. Or college students. Or soldiers on a military base.
\nAnd, 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\u2019s Facebook wall while discussing a cartoon.
\nSee? I didn\u2019t want to get into it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[189,191,190],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-guns","tag-tinker-damns","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NxlE-5Z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1238,"url":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/addressing-the-dropbox-link-change-part-ii\/","url_meta":{"origin":371,"position":0},"title":"Addressing the Dropbox Link Change, Part II","author":"matthannan","date":"16 November 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Well, that obviously didn't work. :-( But, I found this page that talks about getting around the whole ?raw=1 stuff. I wasn't convinced that would work, but it was exciting to see the image pop up in the editing field while writing that post. Let's see what happens, using his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Geek"","block_context":{"text":"Geek","link":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/category\/geek\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/CatherineMaryDraddy-1.jpg?fit=513%2C740&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1725,"url":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/onedrive-on-linux-take-3\/","url_meta":{"origin":371,"position":1},"title":"OneDrive on Linux: Take 3","author":"matthannan","date":"22 March 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I wrote about rclone yesterday, which claims to sync your OneDrive files to your Linux host. This is something that Microsoft has failed to provide to the Linux community. I was hoping to gather all of my files, and then Jenny's files, to one main source in the house, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Geek"","block_context":{"text":"Geek","link":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/category\/geek\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/image-2.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/image-2.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/image-2.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":421,"url":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/tilt-shift-swanseawarren\/","url_meta":{"origin":371,"position":2},"title":"Tilt-shift, Swansea\/Warren","author":"matthannan","date":"1 June 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"via Instagram Whole lotta wooden ships around lately.","rel":"","context":"In "Photography"","block_context":{"text":"Photography","link":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/category\/photography\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/10388020_254004891469287_812135055_n.jpg?fit=640%2C640&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/10388020_254004891469287_812135055_n.jpg?fit=640%2C640&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/10388020_254004891469287_812135055_n.jpg?fit=640%2C640&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":339,"url":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/email-to-my-wife-about-the-newtown-ct-school-shooting\/","url_meta":{"origin":371,"position":3},"title":"Email to my wife about the Newtown, CT school shooting","author":"matthannan","date":"14 December 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Stumbled into a rat's nest of comments following an article about the shooting. The Liberals are angry about the lack of gun laws in this country. And the Conservatives are angry that the Liberals want to take their guns away. They are all just mad. One Conservative poster said \"Even\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life"","block_context":{"text":"Life","link":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/category\/life\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2416,"url":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/what-i-did-on-my-mid-summer-vacation-day-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":371,"position":4},"title":"What I Did on My Mid-Summer Vacation: Day 1","author":"matthannan","date":"5 August 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"I took the week of August 1st off in order to build a new shed in the yard. The old shed had a leaking roof and was, generally, falling apart. In order to build the new one, I had to clear the old one out of the way. The new\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life"","block_context":{"text":"Life","link":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/category\/life\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/IMG_20220730_095958-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/IMG_20220730_095958-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/IMG_20220730_095958-scaled.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/IMG_20220730_095958-scaled.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/IMG_20220730_095958-scaled.jpg?resize=1050%2C600 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/matthannan.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/IMG_20220730_095958-scaled.jpg?resize=1400%2C800 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2176,"url":"https:\/\/matthannan.net\/blog\/the-cold-moon-last-full-moon-of-2020-dec-29\/","url_meta":{"origin":371,"position":5},"title":"The Cold Moon – Last Full Moon of 2020 (Dec 29)","author":"matthannan","date":"17 January 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"With the last full moon of 2020 approaching, I had the thought that I would give astrophotography with the Astronomers Without Borders OneSky telescope another go. 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