Reply #288: Actually [View All]

[MrBenchley]

I'm pretty enthusiastically anti-right wing horseshit, anti-outright lies, and anti-nutcase fantasy. It's noticable that "enthusiasts" are so busy telling me what I think that they never pay any attention to what I DO say.

Americans have the right to own a gun for personal use the same as they have the right to own a rosebush or a doorknob. The Second Amendment confers no individual right to do anything but join a militia, as the courts have ruled AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.

I think we have a right to expect that the gun industry be tightly regulated and that it not be allowed to set public policy. I think we have a right to keep military-style weapons off the market, and expect guns to be registered and gun owners to be licensed and subject to periodic reporting. I think the gun show loophole should be closed. So do most American voters, as polls have shown again and again.

A sizable minority of Americans (38-40%) think handguns should be banned, and the more I listen to "enthusiasts" babble paranoid horseshit and lie their asses off, the more i lean to that sentiment. If it came up seriously, I'd support it. There's also a sizable minority think gun shows should be banned, and I'd agree with that.

I think public Congressional hearings should be held into gun industry marketing and business practices, ala Big Tobacco. I think the gun industry should be subject to liability laws and should not receive any special protection. I'd also like to see one into the hunting industry--the public rationale for hunting is to reduce populations in the wild, but a sizable percentage of hunting takes place on game farms these days.

Piss on the NRA and the GOP...and anybody who puts their popgun fetish above the good of the country.

And for the record, almost everybody (who was not a cop, or did not live in a starkly rural environment) who owned a gun I have ever known was either a lowlife or somebody who shouldn't be allowed to have blunt scissors. I think gun ownership in modern urban and suburban life mainly appeals to a dangerous sort of neurotic, or a criminal.

And I've yet to meet anybody spouting this "gun rights" rubbish (assault weapons are no different than ordinary guns, criminals don't go to gun shows, the unorganized militia is well regulated, yadda yadda yadda) who wasn't a libertarian fuckwit.