To be honest I really do not care what sort of gun control legislation is in place it is OBVIOUSLY not enough. I have seen dozens of unstable people in my career that are in possession of some ridiculous and inappropriate firepower. Some of the things I have seen in EMS employee collections: AK-47s with giant banana clips (two taped together), a rifle that is close to the M-16 modified to work exactly like one (now fully automatic), various sniper rifles with giant scopes and laser sighting, a shotgun modified to be fully automatic, a few fully automatic machine guns from various eras, a whole workshop that was capable of modifying weapons to be fitted for silencers…you name it. None of this stuff has any use other than to kill people from a distance of mass murder a crowd. There is no reason on earth any member of the regular public should own any of this garbage.

I am not interested in owning any of this stuff so I am not familiar with the laws governing ownership. But I don’t think I have to be an expert in gun ownership to make the argument that the above stuff needs more oversight. I see it all the time. It may not be obvious to you, but it is pretty obvious to me that this stuff needs to be CONTROLLED better. Res Ipsa Loquitur. The thing speaks for itself. Thousands of people are injured or killed with guns every year. Bunches of nutbars have inappropriate weapons. So…this isn’t working.

I did make a bit of an argument against the concealed weapon thing. And that’s probably going to be the toughest sell. I have my own feelings that it is ridiculous, but if you are packing heat, you aren’t going to care. I do have a question though. I walk around in the same world you do. I have no urge to carry a weapon. If my neighborhood was that bad I would move. Are you that fearful of the outside world that you walk around at all times with a deadly weapon hidden on you? Back up for a minute and just think about that. You don’t see it obviously, but that’s what us liberals are thinking.

And that was the other part of this post. Liberals don’t often get to vent about this in the way they want to. As I said, I am sympathetic to gun ownership on many levels. So if you are a sane gun owner who cares about this, listen to what is going on in the mind of the person arguing against you. YOU NEED TO SELF-POLICE. Look at your ranks. Are you a member of the NRA? Do you blanket defend the whole organization or would you like to thin the obvious weirdoes out? I think the NRA pretty much accepts dues from all comers and fights any piece of legislation that is even remotely connected to gun control. It would seem that if you wanted to get the heat off your back you would take a look around at your fellow gun owners who were threading fully automatic weapons for silencers and say, “Hey man, lighten up. You are ruining this for the rest of us.” Until then, liberals are going to look at you in a way that you probably find distasteful.

My impression of the fire/EMS/police folks I’ve known is that they tend to be people with personal experience that emphasizes that statistically unlikely but very dire emergencies do happen and must be dealt with. They also tend to belt-and-suspenders people who aren’t satisfied with “Call 911 and hope for the best.”

I’m sure there are people out there who own firearms because they need to feel like big, bad, important people. Just like trucks, sports cars, black belts, and EMS certifications. Your mistake is that you’ve identified one or two uses for a firearm and decided that anyone you don’t think has one of those uses for one must be irrational. That logic doesn’t hold up if they have a reason you haven’t considered–or if they have the right to make their own decisions regarding what they need and what they don’t.

One more note: just in the interest of clarity, “unregistered hand cannon” sounds dire as a figure of speech, but Texas doesn’t register firearms. Most American states don’t. Even in my home state of Illinois, where having a loaded weapon accessible in your car would be a felony and a Firearm Owner’s ID card is required even to handle ammunition, there’s no registration of the firearms themselves. All of that is not to mention that you seem to have declared his firearm “unregistered” without bothering to find out whether it actually was or whether there even was such a thing in your state. Maybe you owe it to yourself to give this issue a little more thought.

I would very much like to know what you would consider good gun control. I think you might be surprised at how much of it is already in effect in places like Illinois with no positive effect. Illinois has no concealed carry provision, gun owners are licensed after extensive background checks and a 30-day wait, private sales at gun shows must be done through FFL dealers with background checks (the so-called “gun show loophole” doesn’t exist here, in other words) and there are waiting periods for all gun transactions, even between private owners–3 days for handguns, 1 day for long guns. Owning machine guns or suppressors is flatly illegal. All of these things are felonies.

Yet we lead all five contiguous surrounding states in every category of violent crime by multiples–even though four of them have robust concealed carry laws, they all allow ownership of automatic weapons and suppressors in accordance with federal law, and none of them require licensing of gun owners or waiting periods.

In short, I don’t hate you, but I don’t agree with you–and that’s not because I’m stupid or because I’m playing Travis Bickle in the mirror between paragraphs. You’d do better to drop the condescension. The two predictable responses to this would be either the “HA! You’re a NUT!” gambit, or the “Well, you’re not like all the rest, you’re one of the good negr–I mean, gun owners” gambit you’ve already used on Nathan . . . but it will be interesting to see whether you’re that predictable. Maybe you’re not.

Thank you for injecting some common sense into the argument. It has been missing from both sides for as long as I have been following it.

It is interesting though that the people who are responsible are self conscious enough to be worried that this was about them. There are probably dozens of nutbars who own 30 weapons and have three hidden on them right now who read this and thought, “Yeah, some people just shouldn’t own guns. Man, I gotta go polish my sword collection!”

I am a liberal. The thing I hate is hatred. I do my best to be a kind and good person.

I also like guns.

No, I do not own a concealed one, and never plan to. But I do enjoy shooting, and I enjoy hunting. My goal is to be responsible for my meat consumption (and yes, I spent many years as a vegetarian). I enjoy my time in the woods, and learning about the wild world around me. I enjoy sighting in my gun and practicing at targets. I believe that it is possible to own and enjoy guns while still being a responsible, thoughtful person.

There are many of us gun owners/enthusiasts who are not about “feeling important” or who have a need to dominate. But we still fear loosing our right to own and use a gun. We fear “legislation for the stupid.”

It is so easy to become as bad as those we disagree with as far as our opinions and absolutes. Don’t punish (or judge) us all because of the idiots out there.

Nathan