I wouldn’t care one way or the other if one were in the house…it would be locked down. but the ms won’t have them. No big deal.

every month when National Rifleman magazine arived I drooled over the mech-eng. porn of the exploded drawing of semiautomatic gun mechanisms. I read the one story each issue had of some brave home owner or shop keeper whose gun had foiled a break-in. When I started grad school in Boston, the facts were all around me and in the news. On a farm you never hear that over a thousand people per month are injured and 300 kids DIE per month from handgun accidents and suicides…that is just people under 19.

the illusion of saftey conjured by a gun grows from the illusion of danger conjured by “news” that assumes only homicides are of interest and science, academic pursuits, art and successful cooperations are booooring.

I sometimes enter the shouting matches and later notice that just by entering, I lost. These are awfully fucked up people and the propagate their illness.

the feldman book is a clear must-read for me.

You may be right about the wan reception the science book got but it only illustrates the growing divide between adequate scientific literacy and where most people are at…the science even leaves a few scientists behind now and then. Unlike the territory covered by Feldman, I feel fairly strong and happy to wade in to the fray for the sake of science.

As far as the guns used in drivebys–how many do you think were legally purchased? There is a huge black market for guns, and I don’t think it is average people who buy guns legally who are going about shooting up neighborhoods.

In the city where I went to college, they are a huge problem.

In the countryside, everyone had guns. We had several lying around in our house, until there was an “incident” with us that made my parents lock them up. People did stupid things with them, (like shooting out the windows of local cars), but there weren’t really lots of homicides or accidental killings. And having a gun to “protect yourself” from criminals? Please. No one would bother to lock their door at night!

On the south side of Chicago, teenagers got shot every week.

In the countryside, if I freaked out because I heard noises downstairs and started shooting, there was a lot of space between me and the neighbors.

In the city, where there was actual crime, if I had a gun and shot four bullets into an actual criminal in my apartment (who was probably just there to steal my TV), the other two would go… where? Into the downstairs apartments, where my neighbors slept, or across the hall where six people were eating dinner.

This is how four-year-olds die in gang-shootings. Gangbangers don’t aim at four-year-olds. Their bullets go astray where one city block contains as many people as my hometown’s downtown, and it’s much more likely that there’s a person in the way. Namely, they go astray into nearby basement apartments where local four-year-olds are doing homework.

Besides, the NRA always told *me*, in my education programs, that I should store my gun locked up and my ammunition locked up seperately. By the time I wake up, identify that the person in my apartment is not actually my roommate, unlock the gun safe, unlock the ammo safe, load the gun, and take aim, I could have been swinging away with the baseball bat.

I know that smoking is not as constitutionally protected as guns are, but I’d really rather take my chances with your secondhand smoke than your stray bullets. And please don’t kid yourself about your aim, people. Handguns, in the dark, when you’re freaked out and trying to hit a dude who’s moving around quickly? They won’t all hit, and my walls are thin.

I propose a compromise: Have them in Rednecksvillia, but don’t bring your guns to town.

Is that a joke?

Considering how many (most?) deliberate shootings, not accidents, involve immediate family members, I’d think the answer to this would be obvious. Point and shoot, just like you would outside the home.

Of course, you’d have to really, really hate someone to do that. To hate someone that much, it’s almost necessary that that person be blood kin or a spouse.

Look at how far the Bush regime has gone, and yet there’s no violence in the streets. No rioting. We still run into a significant portion of the populace that either support Bush, and an even larger portion that will elect McCain for more of the same. Even if the president declared martial law and suspended the constitution, enough of the populace would support the president to make any attempted revolution into a bloody and protracted civil war. The guns will be used often as not on your neighbours as your government.

When it comes down to it, the second amendment will never defend the Constitution the way the first amendment does.The ability to participate in, change, and hold accountable the government is a far more effective control than all the privately stocked munitions in the world. I think the Founding fathers, in their infinite wisdom, made a mistake in listing the right to bear arms without infringement a core principal of the US constitution.

Of course, trying to convince people of that one is a lost cause. =P I’m also not for a total ban on weapons. I think they should be licensed, registered and the owners subject to training in their use, care and safety. But with the power of the NRA and the paranoid style of American politics, I can’t see that happening.

Five years ago I could see how people would buy into this argument, but now? We have before our eyes a very clear and very costly refutation of this. If the Iraqis don’t need tanks or F-16s to cause serious trouble for the US Gov’t it stands to reason we wouldn’t either.

Lack of brute force has never been our problem in Iraq. Whenever the militias present us with an actual target, we stomp it flat. Of course, the friends, neighbors, and kin of the militia members we just killed, who may have been neutral or even friendly toward us before, then turn against us…

Our problem in Iraq is that we’re trying to establish an independent, secular democracy where all of the assorted tribal and religious groups settle their differences peacefully in a place that has no tradition of any of the above. Worse, we’re trying to impose these changes, which require cooperation and the winning of hearts and minds, as an invading force.

It was doomed from the get-go.

If we wanted, we could rule Saddam Hussein style: annihilate the populations the militias disappear into and draw their numbers from. Use the nastiest weapons at our disposal (in his case chemical, in our case nuclear) to make examples of whole communities. We could do it. We’ve done it before. And it would work. But we’re not quite that far gone. Yet.

If it ever came to brave, pistol-packin’ American homeowners fending off the tanks outside his home, we would be.

So, when was it exactly that the Iraqi populace rose up all on their own against Saddam and overthrew him?

I must have missed that one…

Five years ago I could see how people would buy into this argument, but now? We have before our eyes a very clear and very costly refutation of this. If the Iraqis don’t need tanks or F-16s to cause serious trouble for the US Gov’t it stands to reason we wouldn’t either.

That’s the problem with blowhards. . .