I am a gun owner. I enjoy my almost weekly trips to the range to keep in practice and maintain my (moderate) skills. Every once in a while I can even convince my wife to join me. I own one single pistol. It is a .22 caliber semi-automatic. It is perfect for my needs as it is as accurate as I am. Since my only intent is target practice I certainly don’t need anything bigger. It is also economical. I can buy substantially more ammunition for a .22 than anything bigger for the same cost. Basically, twice the fun at half the price.
There are several major aspects of the whole RKBA scenario on KOS that periodically get roiled across this group. What follow are my opinion and only my opinion on the matter. I have no intention of arguing with anyone about them.
I am a liberal Democrat and firmly believe Citizens have a basic right to keep and Bear Arms. At the same time I believe there should be effective gun control and safety oriented laws that encompass certain restrictions on gun purchases, possession and use. I do not agree with the purists that claim there is no space on KOS for someone like myself. I have no intention on leaving, so live with it.
I live in New Jersey. NJ has some pretty stringent gun laws. To obtain my pistol permit I had to fill out a number of forms; provide several references; get fingerprinted by the state police and have them sent to the FBI, and undergo a background check by my local police department. It took almost a month or more. And the permit I have is not a concealed carry license. To me that was no big deal. The law is what it is and I don’t consider these requirements to be onerous in any way.
I believe there is a sizeable population of gun owners in this country and that 99.9% of them are law abiding citizens aware of their responsibility to maintain and use their guns in a responsible manner. I also believe that the whole gun issue is a quicksand trap for Democratic candidates. I do not even consider a potential candidate’s position on gun control versus all of the other threshold questions on policy and position. I completely ignore the gun position unless that is the only position on which two candidates differ. Why do I hold this position? Because I know there are enough pro-gun candidates that one more is not going to make any difference. And if I can elect someone that is going to vote to protect Medicare, who cares if s/he votes for gun control.
Everything I have said above notwithstanding, I also believe there are some pretty stupid gun laws floating around: on both sides of the argument. Whatever dumb fuck voted to allow concealed carry in college bars will sooner or later reap the wind on that one. And there are other aspects of laws that are absolutely absurd. The “Assault weapons” ban is one of them. Most of the AW bans were purely political and were structured and written to meet two criteria. First, to give liberal politicians “chops.” It gave them something to vote for that their liberal constituents would supposedly agree with. Second, the actual ban was meaningless because these same politicians wrote the bills to assure that there was no actual reduction in availability of AWs.
I am not a member of the NRA and never will be. The NRA is, in my opinion, nothing more than an excellent marketing tool for the gun manufacturers and retail gun shops. The NRA’s real purpose is to increase the sales of guns, ammo and related products. The fact that they have convinced a great many otherwise intelligent people to send them money (i.e., “membership dues and contributions”) to fund high salaries and expenses and their marketing efforts is really a genius move. Their campaign to scare the hell out of the gun world by claiming “Obama is going to take away your guns” did wonders for industry sales. I only wish I had loaded up on stock in some of these companies. (You know; like Eric Cantor shorting treasury bills right before he crashes the economy.)
I’m sure there is a lot more to be said but I’ll leave it here as my contribution to the conversation on the subject.