Guns Again

[poliphilo]

How do you argue with someone who thinks the way to solve an epidemic of mass shooting is flood the nation with more guns. It's not a reasonable position. More like a faith position.  Reason won't touch it. Only a Damascus Road experience will do. 

The gun is a tool- like the vacuum cleaner or the feather duster. The difference is you don't get Hoover owners vowing to cling to their machines with their cold, dead hands. It's only the dangerous tools that get fetishized- the sword, the fast sports car, the gun.

I know there are women who wave guns around but it seems to be mainly the male ego that needs to be bolstered by weaponry. Has there ever been a mass shooting perpetrated by a woman? I'm sure there has but I can't think of any.

I don't own a gun. If I did I'd like to think I'd be taking it out of its cabinet today, carrying it into the yard, sticking it on a tree stump and hammering it back into sheet metal.

Comments

[sovay]

Reason won't touch it. Only a Damascus Road experience will do.

Unfortunately, they tend to involve someone else dying on that road first.

[poliphilo]

That tends to be how we learn. We get shocked into changing our minds. And maybe some minds will be changed by this latest atrocity. I think I read this morning that one of the musicians who was on stage when the shooting started has said he's now in favour of gun control.

[cmcmck]

I've not said anything because as a Quaker and pacifist and also as a member of a minority that people quite like to murder, I just can't cope with the sort of thinking that leads to places like this. :o(

[poliphilo]

Fair enough.

[qatsi]

I think you're right, they can't be reasoned with. Trump gets so overwrought about pictures of Syrian children suffering that he sends off a volley of cruise missiles, but right now (or, by implication, after Sandy Hook - or any of the others) is apparently not the time to discuss gun control.