Gun Guys

 --Guns composite, Paolo Pellegrin

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The New York Times recently ran an interview on gun control with Joe Nocera and Dan Baum, a liberal gun owner and author of the book, "Gun Guys: A Road Trip" (What Gun Lovers Think).

It makes sense that we "need to speak with a different voice" on this topic. Now, we have only the National Rifle Association who have totally cleaved from the political Progressives, and the non-gun owning Liberals who deride almost every argument for private gun ownership (they are the knee-jerk liberals who will see fit to laugh even at the man's book title ("Road trip ... like with Bob Hope?")  Everything is fair game for their scattershot attacks.

We need to stop taking potshots and consider the objective, which is our society's safety in this case. Even in this NYT piece which should have been a reasoned debate, the Times writer could barely restrain his thinly-veiled and yet poorly-developed disgust with all things firearms.

Here is an excerpt from Baum's argument:

You don’t understand guns, and you don’t know gun guys, yet you want to make rules for things you don’t understand for people you don’t know. And that is not how we’re going to end up safer.  . . .  We should be insisting on real responsibility from gun owners instead of doing what we’re doing now, which doesn’t get us anywhere. Because you don’t really think that by adjusting the number of rounds in a magazine we’re going to make everybody safer. You can’t possibly believe that. 

. . .

I think somebody who wants to carry a gun should be at least as well trained as the police. Right now, for example, if I wanted to carry a gun, my permit would be good in 30 states. But in every state it’s different. I can wear it in a restaurant in this state, but not in that state. In this place, I can take it near a school, but in that place I can’t. Flip the script. Say, “If you get licensed to carry a handgun, you can carry it anywhere. But you have to be trained at least as well as a police officer.” Do you worry when there’s a police officer in your kid’s school? No. You trust the police officer. Trust gun owners. Raise everybody’s level of responsibility instead of treating them like children. It’s getting us nowhere.