Oh, Josh, No...This is not particularly Insightful:
For a while now JMM has been on a tear trying to bump up traffic by printing "thoughtful" pieces by his readers. I've been almost uniformly unimpressed. His essay on his thoughts on the "tribe" of gun people which was a similar form of trolling cum log rolling… faux sociology and philosophy of the imaginary divide between gun owners and gun-not-owners….
I am not afraid of guns or of triggers. I'm also not afraid of mice or any other little story you guys tell yourselves about women, or people in cities, or liberals, or people who never owned a gun. I'm afraid of people… careless, stupid, ill informed, angry, short tempered, lacking in foresight, paranoid, living in close proximity to relatives and friends… people who forget their keys and where they put their rifle, people who punch the walls when they get excited and may pull the trigger under the same impulse, people who leave their guns out where toddlers can grab them and kill themselves. People are unreliable and people who own guns have something very serious and powerful with which to play out their personal dramas: job loss, old age, dementia, divorce, adolescent angst, quarrels with neighbors.
This is not really that hard to understand…. There are simply people who acknowledge that on balance people are not reliable 100 percent of the time…. We have to legislate for the safety of the majority, not for the pleasure of the minority. We routinely control, as a society, many things that give people pleasure… hell, you can't even burn leaves in my town…. If you want to make a Second Amendment absolutist argument be my guest--but if you want to make in on the grounds that your hazy memories of feeling safe pulling the trigger with daddy gives your gun ownership primacy over my hazy memories of being able to drop my kindergartners off for school well, f@#* you, you don't get to make that argument without some pushback.
We get it, we get it, but we don't respect it.
