Not sure if anyone's noticed, but the quantity of posts is down from my habitual rate.
Turns out my muse doesn't care for me when I'm seething in anger with my own team.
It also turns out that my reply to all of the "pro-gun" nonsense really should have been, "I can see what you're saying, but it hasn't worked yet."
Not once.
Not before I started paying attention to it, not after.
I dunno about a lot of the "pro-gun" crowd, but I've been here since before 1994.
I know I've met a lot of people that didn't start being pro-gun until 2008 and weren't really into guns before 2004 and never really dealt with defeat after defeat.
People who weren't around when you could be kicked off a range for bringing any gun affected by the Clinton AWB. Before William Jefferson Clinton was even elected president.
Playing nice and being the gun owners that didn't offend the gun-grabbers didn't work.
Kicking the people with the black guns to the curb didn't work.
Well, didn't work for us who wanted to keep our guns.
Worked great for the anti-gun side.
For something as important as a civil right, you'd think we'd stop backing losing strategies and look to try new things to see if they work.
You'd think we'd learn from the Fudds tossing the AR owners under the bus that we have to embrace the weirdos. Because today's weird is tomorrow's mainstream.
I cannot stress enough that there are lots of things about owning guns which freak the mundanes. The "pro-gun" side worries incessantly about freaking them out, but forgets that the mundanes are actually quite adaptable.
But you don't dare use the absolute best example of that freaking turning into acceptance; because the worst of the "pro-gun" crowd are also the most freaked by what I'm talking about. Homosexuals.
The LGBT crowd did not back down from freaking the mundanes, they embraced it. They won.
They tried novel strategies and abandoned those which were ineffective.
But we can't emulate "the fags" because... God says so, I guess. As if using the same methodology as the LGBT makes us gay as well?
The mundane aren't partisan. Not like the people on both sides of the gun debate. They, for the most part, don't have a side here.
When they freak, it can be alarming. But after a couple of fruitless freak outs, they notice that they didn't even get hurt, let alone die from what freaked them out and they begin to accept... But they won't start to accept until they've been exposed to things that will scare them.
What we need to be is aware of this and be willing to inoculate them with exposure.
We need to not reinforce the talking points of the anti-gun side by panicking that a mundane was exposed and freaked.
I've never commented, probably won't again. Read this blog everyday, but here's my comment on this post:
ReplyDeleteAmen. Could not have said it better myself.
Angus is pretty much the most sane voice for the pro-gun movement I've read.
DeleteMe? I'm the jerk in the corner yelling, "Tear it down, tear it all down, free the weapons, all of them!"
You are 100% correct, I wish more of the "leaders" that are supposed to be on our side had half the grasp on the reality of the situation that you do.
ReplyDeletePlease keep beating this drum, you'll keep being right!
You know where I've been since the 1980s.
ReplyDelete