Gun Owner

I came across a great interview with the photographer behind the book Armed America over on the Freakonomics blog from about half a year ago. One of the quotes that I found interesting was this one:

I realized that people are “gun owners,” but they’re also made up of thousands of other facets. Most of them don’t sit on the sofa thinking, “Dang, I’ve got a gun.”

I can’t think of any group of people who are antagonized to such an extent based purely on their ownership of an object. However, as is the case with any arbitrary grouping of people, stereotypes and generalizations often prove to be false. Part of the reason I started this blog was to help defeat those stereotypes, on both sides of the gun divide. I’m a liberal gun nut. I’m not afraid to say I’m liberal, and I’m not afraid to say I like guns. And, as it turns out, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. My (mostly) liberal friends and coworkers accept me for who I am, regardless of what I do in my free time, because acceptance is a fundamental principle of liberalism. Some of them have even come to see the myriad of gun control laws as being ineffective and arbitrary at best, severely intrusive and oppressive at worst. All it takes is a little mutual respect, and rational discourse. Unfortunately, both are lacking in the world we live in.