Ray Shreenan
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Wright" <chrisw@skypoint.com>
To: <seaint@seaint.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 10:14 AM
Subject: Re: SHOOTINGS
>
> On Apr 17, 2007, at 3:43 AM, ASC wrote:
>
>> The rest of civilized world never ceases to be amazed
>> with America's love affair with guns.
> I need to say this for a couple of reasons. First as a counterpoint
> to responses about constitutional rights and sophistry about how
> people kill people and guns don't kill people; second, to point out
> that America has no such love affair.
>
> Ssome Americans are indeed gun freaks, but don't lump the rest of us
> with the wackos. Historically, firearms have played an important,
> often ugly, part in life along our frontier. Most people (like my
> family, who were farmers) had them for hunting, and to a small degree
> for self-defense. As people moved west there wasn't any law,
> especially in the territories which had no government. There were
> plenty of criminals, ex-soldiers out of a job or just plain losers,
> westbound maybe just ahead of the law and who didn't mind taking
> whatever they wanted at gunpoint and who frequently took a shot at
> someone while nerved up on whiskey. And for better or worse there
> came Vigilance Committees formed to deal with the worst of them. As a
> result we built up a thriving firearms industry and a huge mythology
> which helps the firearms industry sell guns.
>
> Actually, some of the mythology is partly true, Northfield, Minnesota
> was hit in the 1880's by members of the Cole-Younger gang looking to
> knock over the bank. That was before the FDIC and if the bank were
> cleaned out, the town was done for. The townspeople fought back, not
> with personal firearms, but rifles borrowed from local stores, and
> shot up the gang pretty thoroughly. Two townspeople were killed, the
> head teller of the bank and a farmer who didn't speak english and
> couldn't understand the warnings to take cover. Except for two who
> were killed, the gang took off but were rounded up a few days later
> except for the James brothers who evaded capture. Real wild west
> stuff, but not typical. Northfield was home to a number of Civil War
> veterans who probably had no more of a love affair with guns than
> anyone else who'd seen the elephant.
>
> That said most Americans don't buy into the myths--there's no love
> affair. A great many Americans, probably a majority, feel horrified
> about loose gun laws. What we do have is too-easy access to guns,
> because some of the philosopher-kings in Congress have been rented by
> the gun lobby and because some people still truly believe their guns
> will hold off the US Army if they are beset by tyrants. The fact is
> that even easy access to guns alone doesn't make us all murderers. To
> its shame, Minnesota allows people to carry concealed hand guns,
> provided they have a permit which must be issued by local law
> enforcement after a background check and some (meaningless) safety
> training. But gun crimes haven't increased noticeably, because most
> people don't want to carry weapons. We still have plenty of
> accidental shootings and an unenviable murder rate, of course, but
> the cause isn't a love affair, it's accessibility.
>
> Which excuses nothing, of course, but it does help explain what
> actually goes into all this. Accessibility, not love affairs, lets
> losers and wackos, for whom guns imply power over their enemies, arm
> themselves. Whenever they feel slighted, such crazies think of the
> myths, and imagine themselves going out in a blaze of glory, as a
> winner, finally respected by everyone. That's not a love affair with
> guns, that's lunacy, probably not much different than the lunacy
> which drives suicide bombers.
>
> I went to school at VPI (that's the real name), and took plenty of
> classes in Holden, since it was the Engineering Mechanics building.
> Things have changed a lot, but I'm sure there were losers and gun
> freaks around then, too. There were plenty of things wrong back
> around 1960, but just as now, an excess of self-righteousness won't
> fix it. So cut us some slack.
>
> Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
> chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen.
> .......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania
> 1864)
> http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw/
>
>
>
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