14 Reader Views on Guns
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked readers for their thoughts on guns.
Mark laments changes in American gun culture:
To compare my experience as a little boy in the early ’60s to that of a 10 year old raised in the last decade … The firearms my friends learned to use were primarily hunting rifles. I never heard talk of shooting for “fun,” it wasn’t why firearms were kept. Those dads taught their sons about father/son rituals, not about firearms as recreation, or arming for arming’s sake. If today’s boys mostly learn about guns through gaming, social media, and entertainment, no wonder firearms aren’t feared or viewed as inherently dangerous—how can boys react with grief or feel the horror of actual gun deaths when they are exposed to ubiquitous, gratuitous, and immersive gunplay designed to pump adrenaline or dopamine with addictive fury? Today, there is no separating firearms from fantasy; sadly, the result is overly accessible firearms in the hands of people who never learned to fear a loaded weapon pointed at another human being.
Dennis concurs:
I grew up in the decades after World War II on Western films and movies about The War. Many of us kids had toy guns realistic enough that today a person might get shot by a police officer who encountered you carrying one. We played war, and cowboys and Indians—a lot. However, my father was an Army Reservist all through my childhood, and I remember a lot of military firearms on our kitchen table as my dad refreshed his memory on disassembly, cleaning, reassembly. My dad made it plain that there was a big difference between our toy firearms and the actual firearms he worked on. My dad was also a hunter. He would go to hunt rabbits, pheasants, ducks. He kept a shotgun, a side-by-side double. And that for me is a touchstone for that time. Most guns were about hunting, less firepower was better than more. Double guns were “better” than pump-action or self-loading shotguns. Lever-action rifles were cool thanks to all the Western movies of the era, but serious shooters used bolt-action rifles, which were more accurate and showed that the person behind the sights could do the job with one shot. Accuracy, precision were respected; the ability, or tendency, to just blast away was not.
All that is to explain the shaking of my head as I look at what “gun culture” has become. I like firearms the way I like other well-designed and well-crafted tools. I own handguns and a shotgun.
