Having lived all my life in suburban areas, first in the Northeast, then in the Mid-Atlantic, and now in the South, I’ve encountered many private gun owners. I have met avid hunters and avid shooters. I have also met people who own a gun, but haven’t taken it out of the safe in years. Some acquired it by happenstance, others purchased it very intentionally. All will argue that their weapon(s) serve a valuable self-defense function, even though none has ever used them for that purpose.
A minority will hunt, and they will own rifles primarily. A smaller number, usually those owning handguns as well as rifles, will target shoot on even a semi-regular basis. These are the folks – the enthusiasts – who would, if allowed, buy light weapons and heavy ordnance. Most of the gun owners I know are in another category altogether. They will own a handgun or two. They will have used it twice, on average. Once, on the range, very shortly after their purchase, and once, at the instigation of friends, during a social outing. All of these people, whatever their hobbies, will typically be staunch Republicans and Evangelical Christians with extended family in rural parts of the country. They will know people who use guns for all of the reasons mentioned at the outset of this paragraph, even if they themselves do not. For these people, gun ownership for reasons of self-defense is usually on a short list of putatively “adult responsibilities” – becoming certified in First Aid, learning to drive a stick shift, volunteering around the community, building a “Go Bag” for emergencies, and learning to swim.
In my experience, gun owners have had few words, kind or unkind, for the NRA, and if they talk about gun control, they will almost never invoke the idea that private gun ownership is a meaningful check on tyranny. They will worry instead about the registration of guns and their owners, and they will casually describe gun control as an obsession of a Looney Left™. Almost all of them have said at some point or another that “weapons bans” are largely cosmetic, and that gun control legislation is doomed to failure because so many guns are already in private hands.
The interesting current here is that all of my gun owning friends have essentially bought into the argument that guns make a home more safe, not less. This is true even though I know only a handful of gun owners who are childless.
In my experience, liberals tend to worry about guns not because they fear that the intended owners will use them to do violence, but because they are concerned about who else might have access.
And that is really one of the two big arguments today. The first is whether or not restricting access to certain kinds of accoutrements (extended clips) will hinder mass killing as it is being carried out. (And here, there is an unspoken assumption that very brave people will be able to charge and subdue the shooter while he or she is reloading.) The second is whether we focus on culture (violence, mental health), on the tools of violence (gun control), or both.
I suppose I’ve always tended to agree with that famous notion of Spock’s: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Because I don’t see firearms as contributing meaningfully to my own personal safety, owning one seems like nothing so much as a liability. If I don’t intend to use it, why keep one around? I’m also discouraged from thinking too deeply about what kinds of weapons should be available for private purchase because I am convinced that my government isn’t to be feared. And even if it were, what hope could a rag-tag band of untrained, overweight insurgents mostly unfamiliar with the Great Outdoors have against a world-class professional military? The colonial militia didn’t win the Revolutionary War, and it wasn’t nearly as impromptu a fighting organization as is popularly supposed. Gun ownership was an obligation. Militias drilled at least semi-regularly. Most able bodied men knew how to shoot. Civilians and professional soldiers had access to essentially the same kinds of small arms and light weapons. And the colonial army was leavened by the large number of men who had cut their teeth fighting the French or the Indians or both.
