Today’s a good day to talk about love. And no, not the love we have for a clone-correct SOPMOD Block III — that is a special, private love which one can only properly indulge in a forum thread with internet strangers. Today’s a good day to talk about love for people.
The core of modern, yes-guns-are-weapons gun culture is that ownership of weapons is a feature, not a bug, in a free society. For someone who’s not fluent in cultures where that’s the common view, it’s a jarring idea. Reflecting on the idea of a concealed carrier putting on a gun in the morning, they might think, “What a shame that they feel a desire to do that. One day society will mature beyond that.” Whereas the concealed carrier is thinking, “How empowering that I can do this. One day society will mature to the point that this is ubiquitous.” (Legally, concealed carry is in fact on its way to ubiquity. But you know what we mean. In the few remaining states where it’s a privilege with which the state blesses a chosen few, it’s by definition very rare.)
So you’ve got two people reflecting on the same act and interpreting it in diametrically opposite ways. The first person sees anti-social paranoia. The second sees pro-social personal responsibility.
One way to think about this is through the lens of motivations. A gun carrier, or more generally someone who owns a gun for self-defense, is motivated by the capability to be there for their loved ones and themself if all else fails. We put it like this in “OSD 149: Nobody goes to the anti-gun range”:
It’s automatic to go straight to politics, culture war, and the various threats to gun rights, but the irony is that if you spend all your time on that stuff, you’re spending all your time on the opposite of what gun rights are about.
Ask why gun rights are important, and people will give you examples that appeal to their worldview. The gun is for home defense. A check on the government’s willingness or ability to tyrannize. A tool to dispatch rattlesnakes on the farm. A last resort against a mugger. There are dozens of other examples, and they’ll each reflect what matters to the person citing it.
But what they have in common is that they all sprout from the same seed: if someone’s hurting you, you have the right to stop them. That’s it, it’s that simple. That in turn comes from something even simpler: life is awesome, and you want to be here to enjoy it. So while to the unfamiliar, gun rights might seem insular, like a statement of the gun-wielder against society, the reality is quite the opposite: gun rights are only important to the extent that you have a pro-social love of being here. Self-defense isn’t the end in itself. Self-defense is just a means to the end of sticking around to love your life and your community. Someone who doesn’t love life would have no reason to defend theirs.
To be there for others and for yourself when nobody else can be, that’s an act of love. Doesn’t mean everyone needs to be into this stuff, or that those who aren’t are unloving. But it is a good reminder about the deep, and oft-forgotten, positivity of gun culture. That’s the foundation we all get to build on.
This week’s links
Dan Harmon of Rick and Morty put on NVGs and rode a scooter at night
It went entertainingly.
The Washington state senate passed a magazine capacity bill
The bill will now go to the state’s House of Representatives, and then on to the governor to be signed into law. The House and governor are both supportive of a magazine ban, so the default outcome is that this becomes law. Head over to /r/WA_guns to learn about efforts to stop it.
We’ve written about how state-level gun laws have bifurcated, with states either getting much friendlier or much less friendly to gun rights, and not much in between. Washington is the exception there. It has historically had a strong gun culture and was among the first states to pass shall-issue carry. But without the U.S. Supreme Court stepping in, the state’s future with respect to gun rights is unlikely to be as bright as its past. There’s still plenty of work to do though, and the answer, as ever, is to keep expanding gun culture.
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