I too am a liberal who is against banning guns. Good responsible sane people should be able to have them if they choose. You can have guns and gun control
Goddammit, why is that SO hard for some people to understand? :lamo
I grew up around a bunch of old guys who were like Elmer Fudd.
You never had to worry about these people. All they wanted to do was be able to go out and bag themselves a duck or a wascally wabbit, or a deer, and they didn't want any nonsense happening around their homes and shops.
I dated their daughters fer chrissakes. You might be in a spot of trouble if you "treated them like a whoo-urr" and they found out
(did you ever get that "don't you go treatin' her like some whoo-urr" talk from one of these old dudes?) but you knew they probably weren't going to shoot you as much as make you marry the daughter.
You'd have to screw up pretty bad, in which case I guess you had it coming anyway, right?
They'd much rather be your daddy than be your killer.
You pretty much knew that they were ingrained with some kind of "what's right is right and what's wrong is wrong" sensibility. Most of them were from The Greatest Generation, and you knew that, too. They understood that being a gun owner meant they had to carry a helluva lot of responsibility, and they were sometimes the first to stand up and tell anyone that "so and so down the road had no business owning a goddam gun because he's two beers short of a six-pack" and that the G-men oughta go pay a visit and take his guns away
"because that boy ain't right."
For me, that IS what GUN CONTROL is all about...a way to determine if "the boy ain't right" and has no earthly business being around any kind of guns, even as good folks get to continue enjoying the exercise of the Second Amendment.
It isn't a liberal issue, it's a universal issue that transcends party ideology.
When I lived in Texas I knew people who were the biggest ultra-Right ass clowns imaginable as far as their politics were concerned, and they had tonz o' gunz, but I also knew instinctively that they had that same "what's right is right and what's wrong is wrong" sensibility about them.
So I trusted them to have their tonz o' gunz because I also knew that they thought anyone running around in the middle of town strapped with a major piece of shooting hardware was probably some kook with a chip on their shoulder and a pee-pee that wasn't enough to satisfy anyone.
The lawmen ought to have a lot of leeway in getting to know who's who and whether or not they deserve the responsibility, and they ought to have the ability to make that determination in a way that services the security needs of the community at large.
Heavy duty hardware carries an extra demand to demonstrate extra responsibility, that's all.
It's more power, so it's more important that a person show good cause.
Even in the olden days, back in the Wild West, local sheriffs had the power to pass ordinances that said that there were to be no guns carried around in town, because the sheriff had determined that the town needed that kind of ordinance to maintain civil order.
Alcohol, gambling, and a shortage of women could set off men and have them reaching for their guns. These days it could be Xanax, PTSD or a shortage of common sense, but it's the same problem.
Towns like Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City had some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. They had borders called "dead-lines".
Cross that line carrying a gun and you could wind up dead. Turn in your shooting irons when you come into town, pick em up when you leave.
We used to know how to handle this.
