u/logicalpretzels

In a country with the right to bear arms and more guns than people, it seems natural that everyone should be taught firearm safety from youth.

You wouldn’t even need a real gun to teach gun safety, just a couple SIRT pistols or even just plastic training guns would do the trick to teach the 4 basic rules.

I feel like this should be easily supported by anyone no matter their feelings towards guns or gun control. Just like sex ed, gun education can only make the activity safer, not worse.

Are there any schools in the US where gun safety is part of their curriculum?

Imagine how wildly popular and electable a populist Socialist who doesn’t want to ban guns would be in the US. That candidate would win almost any seat.

Obviously, the issue of gun violence in the US is atrocious and desperately needs to be addressed; however, it’s fundamentally a systemic and sociopolitical problem that cannot be helped by banning away AR-15s. Gun violence is caused by things like:

-Poor access to healthcare (especially mental healthcare)

-Poor economic opportunity

-Housing insecurity

-The racist failure of the Drug War

-Toxic masculinity

-Far-right ideology

-Social alienation

Banning “assault weapons” does not address any of these things, therefore it is not an effective way to curtail gun violence. It’s also impossible to actually accomplish, practically speaking, since we don’t have a gun registry in the US and don’t know who owns what gun. To tackle the issue of gun violence, we need to instead tackle it’s root causes that I just laid out.

Anyway, as Karl Marx said:

“Arms and ammunition should never be surrendered. Any attempt to disarm the worker must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

And yes I know Graham Platner doesn’t support AWBs, but virtually ever other Democratic Socialist candidate does. It’s time we get serious about addressing gun violence in the US instead of advocating for impossible and ineffective magical solutions like banning away the scary looking guns.

I actually like the smell of Break Free CLP. Hoppes smelled awful to me, despite what some say. Silly question, but what toxic solvent/lubricant do you enjoy using because of the smell?

For me growing up with Liberal parents, I always had an aesthetic interest in guns, especially old West guns like the Colt SAA, but as I watched endlessly the horrific mass shootings on the news, I also blindly subscribed to the usual anti-gun narratives; I basically thought that guns have no place in civilized society and should be relegated to inoperable museum pieces only. Before you ask, I never gave much thought as to whether that gunless ideal world would include military and police or not. If you had asked me then, I probably would have said something like “without guns, there will be no need for military and police”. I was extremely politically ignorant.

Then COVID and BLM happened, and as I watched the breakdown of society in the face of global pandemic and calls for simple police accountability met with brutality, I realized that our Capitalist world is already built upon violence, on it’s most basic, fundamental level, and that if we oppose violence, we must also advocate for systemic change away from hierarchical and exploitative structures, and towards more democratic and horizontal ones. And thus I became a Leftist.

Violence isn’t just blood and guts. Violence is, at it’s core, force and coercion of others. To give your labor to unaccountable, dictatorial private corporate entities, or else starve, is force and coercion. To surrender your right to protection to the agents of state power, who are in many cases the very ones you really need protection from, is force and coercion. Capitalism is violence, and state power is violence.

With the mirage of “peace” shattered, I realized that self defense and community defense are not only acceptable, they are imperative, especially as we see the rise in Fascist movements and the supporters of Fascism far out pacing the rest of us in armament and training. Like seriously, why the fuck is every far-right white supremacist homophobe armed to the gills? Wtf are they planning? I ain’t gonna be a sitting duck to them.

That understanding, combined with simply educating myself on firearms in the US and how utterly impossible disarmament actually is here, resulted in me now being one of the most vocal pro-gun advocates in my social circles, all of which are Liberal or Leftist.

How did your thoughts on guns evolve, and why?

For me, I just want a Boss DM-2W with tap tempo. *Not* the DM-101; that’s a very cool pedal but way too much going on, too much option paralysis and redundant settings, and so expensive. No, *just* a DM-2W with a tap tempo; that’s it.

Just wondering what experiences you all have had when your fellow Progressives learned you owned guns.

Personally most of my interactions with fellow Progressives regarding guns were surprisingly unjudgemental, but once or twice we got into it on AWBs (obviously I oppose AWBs, they supported them).