05-04-2018, 07:03 PM
(05-04-2018, 07:47 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(05-03-2018, 10:42 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Meanwhile, the reds (and especially the NRA leadership and all who support their policies) DO want to stop people who live in cities awash in guns from regulating them.
From my perspective, the phrase "awash in guns" is a values statement that the situation is unacceptable, and must change. The desire to regulate is a desire to use the force of government to change the culture. Thus, the point stands. Both cultures desire to change the other, and must to get their goals? They just don't see their own culture's infringements.
Certainly, in many urban areas, being awash with guns is indeed unacceptable. Those in rural areas seem resigned to accept it, although they too experience heightened gun violence as a direct result.
Guns are not in any sense positive. It is only to be admitted that many Americans today think that they are. Fine. We have to accept the different values that exist in our culture, within some limit of decency.
But if people in rural areas, who accept guns as part of their culture, seek to stop urban areas from having the regulation they need, then it is the reds who are imposing their culture on the blues, by insisting on opposing the national gun regulations that alone can deal with the situation of cities awash in guns, and insisting that people in urban areas should look upon guns in the same way that rural folks do.
And the red rural culture has only recently been awash with military weapons like the AR-15. This is not an acceptable situation, regardless of the distorted "values" that may uphold it. The national gun regulations being proposed (and likely to be approved in the 2020s) would not affect the rural gun culture as it was before the recent acceleration which David alluded to--- the expansion of military weapons with large magazines, open and conceal carry laws, repeal of existing regulations, concentration of gun ownership, etc., all propped up by the criminal institution called the current NRA leadership, otherwise simply and correctly called the gun lobby, and all who back it. This is a 4T delusional culture quite similar to that of Dixie on the eve of the Civil War; a mad and demonic defense of outdated and dangerous civil attitudes, and now making violent threats to the civil order.
The current obsession with guns in rural and red America is thus not based on any cultural or social value that deserves any respect. It is a distortion of the gun and rural value system that existed before, which blues recognize, even if some folks like me still think that too is illegitimate in the long run.