Lex Anteinternet: The problems with every debate on gun control are....

Lex Anteinternet: The problems with every debate on gun control are....: that most gun control suggestions are written by people who are blisteringly ignorant on firearms and the statistics and examples people thr...

The added problem is that a lot of gun control proposals aren't about guns.

They're about behavior control.  As in "you shouldn't be doing that because I personally don't approve of it".

There's a lot of that going around anymore. 

And that's part of the reason that legislative attention  to this issue commonly fails.  It isn't, in reality, that most firearms owners don't have some views of where they themselves think that things can and maybe should be addressed. But they tend not to offer then and retreat back into the collective anonymous mass who oppose anything as they're soon insulted and then have reason to fear that whatever the change is will become in fact an effort to take everything.

It doesn't help that a lot of people who back gun control when the screaming is the loudest are people who basically want the world covered in glass, steel and Nerf and want to hang out in big city parks all day eating tofu gluten free sandwiches and sipping free trade green tea. These people are radically opposed to nature and they look it.  And they're flat out radical.  Ban guns and they'll go right on banning whatever doesn't fit their sanitized  Charlotte's Web view of the world.  The list is endless.  Hunting, livestock farming, big gulp drinks, you name it.

Some of the commentary on this end, which it doesn't come from the effete Greenwich Village crowed, comes from people who live in a seriously fluffy bunny world.  For example, the Casper Star Tribune ran a letter from somebody who "wished" that "all the automatic assault weapons" belonged only to "the warriors of the world who must fight wars" and then went on to wish there were no wars and that everyone loved each other.

Well, Sweet pea, most people wish everyone loved everyone, as they define it, but that situation will not prevail until the Second Coming. Beyond that, 99.9999999% of all the "automatic assault weapons" in the world do in fact belong to "warriors" of one kind or another, as fully automatic weapons are extremely rare in civilian hands anywhere, accepting, as we do for argument, that guerilla armies can be considered combatants for this purpose.  FWIW, however, they are not solely legal for civilians in the United States.  There are actually big patches of the globe where owning a fully automatic weapon is perfectly legal and much easier to get than in the US, which is not to say that they're globally common in civilian hands.

Indeed one of  the real questions, in my mind, is whether the bump stock that was used in Las Vegas was a legal attachment, and I'm not the only one wondering that.  I've satisfied myself that it is, but only barely.

These debates also tend to bring up the wildest claims by people who are focused on some other agenda and seek to apply it to their preconceived notions about the world.  Here's one such example from Salon:

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was put in place largely to help ensure that Southern states would have access to guns and a militia to suppress slave rebellions.

No, it wasn't.  That's just dumb, or at best ignorant.

It was put in place because the founders of the republic hugely feared, and opposed, standing armies and didn't want one. Indeed, at first, there wasn't one.

Early in the nation's history slave owners often armed slaves for hunting, to make holding them cheaper.  They rationed out powder and shot, but they would give arms suitable for hunting at least small game to slaves in the hope and expectation that they'd partially provide for themselves. 

This is not to say that there are not extreme and un-informed opinions on the other side of this debate.  For example, I learned through it that there are people who really feel that the NFA, which heavily regulated fully automatic weapons sales in the US, and the Hughes Amendment which provided that no automatic weapons manufactured after 1986, should be repealed.

I'm pretty sure that most firearms owners do not feel that way, and up until recently, I wasn't aware that there were even people upset about the Hughes Amendment.

Indeed, in this debate, when people resort to throwing rocks as the Second Amendment and claiming its obsolete as "well. .  would it protect a rocket launcher", the debate gets so loud and noisy that people fail to realize that it protects "arms", not ordnance.  Artillery and artillery like things are, in the 18th Century context, ordnance, not arms.  Fully automatic weapons like machineguns are arguably ordnance as well, in that context, as they're closest by analogy to field artillery using grape.  

Not that anyone is going to notice this as the antis are too busy telling guys who have never heard of bump stocks (and most of us hadn't) that we now need to surrender our Ruger 10/22s.