Reply #40: Remember the movie "Wag the Dog"?

[rrneck]

At one point there was a shot of a guy wearing a "Fuck Albania" shirt in response to Robert Deniro's made up war. Most gun owners are just people who own guns. Some are Amercian consumers that buy too much of that shit because it's fun and they have the money to throw at it. And there are a few idiots who can be easily manipulated by the right authoritarian. There are no doubt others that are just stupid. And there are a few crazy ones. We always hear about those when they shoot somebody. The guy you saw might have been one of the crazy ones, but I'm betting stupid. I doubt he was my kind of people.

And that interests me. Actually seeing an individual in person and interacting with them is the best way to know them. Since you saw the guy, you acquired a ton of information that none of the rest of us could get. Overall appearance, body language, context of interaction and everything else involved gave you information that even you may not have been aware of. Maybe he gave you the heebie jeebies for a good reason.

I was raised in the south, which is to say I've been around guns and their owners all my life. I have yet to meet someone crazy enough to shoot somebody for no reason. I haven't met anyone that would willingly shoot anybody period, and I've been around. But I understand the culture and the people that inhabit it. It makes it less scary.

I'm pretty convinced that education could solve most of the problems surrounding both sides the gun debate and the problems of guns in our culture in general.