Friday, December 21, 2012

Gun Thoughts

I have been listening carefully to all the comments about gun ownership on my thread and have come to the conclusion that support of gun possession does not fall simply along political lines. *******It would be tempting to write off those suspicious of gun regulation as white people fearful of Blacks and Latinos or afraid of a Federal conspiracy to take away their rights now that we have a Black man elected to the office of President for two consecutive terms *******But if you listen carefully to what gun owners are saying, some of them, a good portion white , some Black and Latinos, are most scared of their own neighbors who are of the same background as they are! *******What you have is a society where large numbers of people are living in fear, and neither trust the government, trust the police, or trust the people living around them. And this combination of fear and mistrust, toxic even under the best of circumstances is even more so in a country where so may people own guns ********You cannot get support to disarm the general population because people don't trust the government that would be doing the disarming. And you can't disarm the government because people fear that armed minorities would then terrorize the population. **********The result- a complete political stalemate on the gun issue and one that won't change until fear and insecurity levels in this society diminish sharply, some deriving from demographic shifts, many stemming from growing poverty and economic hardship. We have a domestic arms race in which appeals to unilateral disarmament fall on deaf ears. And I say this as someone who has NEVER been tempted to get a gun

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