Slate "Americas Gun Fantasy" (Great Read - excerpt from the book Fantasyland)

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/fantasyland-book-excerpt-the-nra-won-the-gun-rights-debate-and-made-americans-fear-their-own-government.html

Three percent of the nation owns half the firearms—to prepare for an ultraviolent showdown that exists only in their imagination.

OCT. 05, 2017 COVER STORY

Excerpt reprinted from Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History copyright © 2017 by Kurt Andersen. With permission from the publisher, Random House. All rights reserved.

One set of fantasies has had more current, awful, undeniable real-world consequences than any other: the one that recast owning guns as among the most important rights, as American liberty and individualism incarnate. During my lifetime, the love of guns has become a fetish.

As a little kid, I was perpetually armed with cap guns until I graduated to BB guns and then, at YMCA summer camp and a great-uncle’s farm, to .22 rifles. One of my fondest childhood memories is my dad and me turning an old 3-inch pipe into an improvised cherry bomb–powered mortar to fire tennis balls at grazing cows 50 yards away. One of my older brother’s fondest childhood memories is ordering me to run across the backyard so he could shoot me with a BB gun from 30 yards and watch me crumple in pain to the ground, which he excitedly said at the time “was just like a movie.” As an adult, I’ve enjoyed hunting turkey and shooting skeet, always feeling a little like Daniel Boone or Lord Grantham. And when my wife went to China and got to fire an Uzi at a shooting range, I was very jealous.

I get the fun of guns, and of the various fantasies that shooting makes possible.

But. Oh, but. I thought of my BB gun escapade not long ago, when I read an essay by the poet Gregory Orr. Just days before Orr’s piece was published, on a firing range outside Las Vegas, a 9-year-old had lost control of her fully automatic Uzi and shot her instructor dead. Orr is my brother’s age. When he was 12, the age my brother was when he shot me with a BB on purpose, Orr accidentally shot and killed his little brother while they were hunting. “To hunt,” Orr wrote, “to fire a gun is to have your imagination tangled up with fantasies of power. A fatal accident makes a mockery of these fantasies.”


__________snip_____________

much more to read at the link.

[Spartikis]

1. Really?

I didn't read the whole article but im 100% sure more than 3% of americans own firearms. In fact its something quite ridiculous like I think there is 1 gun for every person, with about 100 million of the 350 million people in the US who own guns, so like 30%.

I have multiple family members who are die hard republicans, they own guns but ive never heard them talk of a civil war. Most are worried about crime, and I cant blame them, my home has been broken into, there have been rapes in my neighborhood, cars stolen, etc... and I actually live in a good neighborhood.

[Kingofalldems]

2. Read it again. 3% own half the firearms.