Why Are They Pushing Gun Control?

Occam said:

First, try living in (especially lower) Montgomery County for a while. If you can make yourself do it, talk to some people. You'll be shocked at the level of both ignorance-driven and rabidly ideological opposition to gun ownership of any kind. In no particular order, I've seen:

1) People who have never personally seen or touched let alone used a firearm, and know of nobody in their family that ever has ... but who are convinced that they are so dangerous that anyone who would even consider owning one is frighteningly reckless and should be genuinely feared. As in, fear for your life feared. This sounds hyperbolic, but it's not. This is baseline for many voting, campaign-contributing households around here.

2) The level of hatred for people who don't adhere to the progressive/lefty worldview is off the charts. These are folks who actually mean it when they say that if you didn't vote for Hillary then you are literally a Nazi. Anyone who doesn't see that Kavanaugh is obviously a serial rapist is a blind fool who wants to return to slave owning and beating wives into submission after we have a war against all the rest of the world. Sounds comic-book-villain-crazy, right? These people earnestly say things like that to each other. We're talking about well-off professionals, here, and this is how they see YOU. And because they know that organizations like the NRA lean towards politics that go against their grain, then the NRA is obviously evil incarnate, and anyone who might be even loosely "that type" is actively, deliberately trying to ruin the world and kill their daughters and whatnot. Yes, it's foaming-at-the-mouth crazy crap, but they've mentally assigned gun owners (and thus, gun ownership) into (wait for it!) a Basket Of Irredeemable Deplorables with whom there can be no conversation, no compromise, no understanding - and so ANYTHING that the Deplorables want to defend or think is good must be crushed. For a lot of these people, it's that simple. "I hate you, and you like guns, so I automatically, passionately hate guns, too."

3) No, it's not about wanting to make sure that when they finally get total government control that you're disarmed so you can't resist the government. They think it's utterly delusional to even consider some rabble-populated band of militia crazies being a threat to the full power of a government military and law enforcement operating under the control of the politicians they think should run the country. They really do think that gun owners who consider the 2A to be in any way about resisting the government are naive fools. REPEAT: They think you're not just dumb and unsophisticated, but actually living in a childish fantasy world where you like to play with guns. That's the level of patronizing, condescending derision and contempt we're talking about, and it's not just a few of them, it's MOST of them.

4) Some of them really do think that if only YOU weren't allowed to have a gun, ever, that eventually the criminals would run out of guns to have and we'd finally see peace in our time. They don't consider the routine murders by stabbing or beating to be meaningful because ALL they can think about is the murder that the NRA commits using guns. If you ask them to talk about, say, the "knife crime" in London, they'll deflect and say that's a local problem and at least they don't have thousands of children being murdered every hour by NRA lobbyists using bump stocks.

Basically: the tribal political hatred has grown to inconceivably toxic heights, and the gun issue is just a super-convenient thing to latch on to. It's an easy lever for emotional appeals to get their people elected, and many of the more visible people they see on the news carrying in public or other horrific things come across to them like Old White Male Rednecks, and can be safely loathed like NO other group can. One simply cannot over-estimate the level of deeply-baked-in intellectual dishonesty and ignorance on this front. Mostly, guns are a proxy for their overall hatred of anyone who opposes their wider agenda.

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