Gun Culture

The bullet points are flying out there, but none of them are hitting their targets. I get it from both sides.

I'm pro-gun in the Palin sense. I grew up around guns. My father owned guns, and my grandfathers owned guns. Guns were used for hunting and for a sense of personal security, though the latter feeling is rather imperfectly formed because I've never defended myself with one.  I even own a gun (a .22 rifle) which my brother looks after back in Wisconsin. When my son was of a certain age, I joined a shooting range here in California so that I could teach him about guns and above all how to respect them.

I don't keep a gun at home because my wife abhors them. She was raised by Europeans in America: upright liberal Dutch with vestigial Calvinism. What possible reason could a law-abiding citizen have for a gun? Call the gendarme. Without the frontier experience, a culture of guns has no utility for such people. The Swiss have a tradition of personal weaponry but even within Europe the Swiss are seen as outliers.  Be tolerant of gun culture and personal armaments.  It won't kill you.

Some may argue that the fight is about threats, and that life imitates art. But there's something more sinister at work here and both sides know that.