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Browsing the archives, I stumbled across the following little gem and thought I'd repost the conversion experience of another member:
NightRainFalls (71 posts) Fri Jul-01-05 07:12 PM
Original message
Thoughts on Confronting Your Beliefs (long)
Dear Reader,
I am sure you agree with me, in struggling to understand our world, we all create myths. Many of these myths embody stereotypes that we have found to be true. I am also sure that you will agree with me, when we encounter someone with a different mythos than ours, it can be extremely difficult to understand how they can think what they think. Sometimes, we have a rare opportunity to expose the flaws in our own personal mythos. Sometimes we have the ability to examine our own stereotypes and learn that though they are often true, they are only half true. This is a reflection on one of those occasions.
When I was a youngster I learned to shoot in Boy Scouts. To me, firearms were arcane diversions that were not really relevant to civilized world. During my childhood, war was something that happened far away, in less civilized parts of the world. I was of the opinion that there was no need to own firearms, beyond the skeet gun or .22 used for sport. I might have allowed room for a twelve gauge for deer hunting, but a bow seemed more sportsmanlike.
When I was in college I was shocked to discover that my roommate kept a gun for self defense. I even tried to talk him out of it.
I also voted for Bill Clinton twice, and thought the AWB was a great idea, because who needs fully automatic cop killing military rifles to hunt with. I was certainly against concealed carry, and I was convinced that only red necks carried guns for anything other than sporting purposes. To me, most legitimate gun owners were either hunters or sportsmen. The Second Amendment clearly only applied to militias.
Then two things happened. First I read the Federalist Papers, and an early version of Blackstone commentaries on the Constitution. I began to realize that the Second Amendment was meant to do much more than my teachers and college professors had let on. Then, my old college friend showed me a pre-ban AK-47 clone. I asked if it was legal to own it, he said yes. I asked why? He took me to the range and I shot it. I was surprised to discover it wasn’t a machine gun at all. You couldn’t really shoot it quickly or accurately from the hip. Indeed, almost nothing the press had said or implied about the gun was true. It was not even that powerful.
Something had started to happen. I began to realize that what I knew was only an illusion. The first cracks in the walls of my mythos expanded on another trip to my friend’s range. Two men were practicing combat hand gunnery on the plates course. When they where finished I naively asked them if they where cops. Actually they were not. One was a surgeon, the other a pediatrician. Prior to that moment I had been sure that only police and rednecks carried guns for self defense, and only police needed them.
I would later learn that this stereotype is deeply flawed, but seemingly self evident. I am sure that many of you nodded your heads in agreement when you read it. It is your stereotype also. Here is how so many people have come to believe it. The redneck, cracker, hillbilly (whatever name you want to use) is usually a braggart. If he or she has a gun everyone knows about it. When a member of the upper-class carries a gun, he or she carries it in an ankle holsters above Italian leather shoes, or tucked under a hand tailored suit jacket. To maintain a tactical advantage, the intelligent gun owner carries secretly. No one knows about them, but everyone knows about the red neck.
When I attended my first bull’s eye competition I was shocked to discover that many of the participants were women. In the patronizing tone anti-gunners so often use, I asked why women would carry guns, didn’t they know women suffer the tremendously from gun violence? They did.
One woman took me aside and patiently explained to me that she understood were I was coming from. When she first got married she didn’t want her husband to have a gun in the house. Now she was teaching her daughter to shoot. She told me that women could become victims at any time, and that for her a gun was a way to fight back. She was proud that she could fight back with such deadly accuracy. She showed me the true meaning of gun control when she shot a magazine of .45 caliber rounds into a single ragged hole in a target 15 yards away.
As I learned more and more about guns and gun owners, I learned that guns are not some great evil to be feared. They are remarkably refined tools that can be used for good as well. A great many people, liberal and conservative, upper class and redneck, male and female carry guns every day. Handled properly by responsible adults, guns are completely safe. Most importantly, a lot of what the anti-gun extremists say about guns is ignorant, untrue, or misrepresentative. I know this because I was once one of them.
Sincerely,
David
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