20 dead in Orlando gay club shooting

[Esquilax]

The Japanese, it should be noted, also seem to have a healthy respect for guns and what they represent, too. They don't treat them as toys, or rhetorical chest-thumping devices, like Americans do.

My uncle took me out to teach me shooting at age nine. He taught me respect for the weapon, taught me to never point it at someone I didn't intend on killing. Taught me that every gun is loaded, taught me that I held the power of life and death in my hands -- "Boy, this will kill anyone on that end. Is that what you want to do?"

I'm not unusual in that regard. I know there are dipshits who use guns for compensation and swagger, but there's a hell of a lot of media bullshit in your verbiage, it seems to me.

Even here, advocating for gun rights, I don't own one myself, so it's not about chest-thumping or anything, your overbroad generalization aside. Poison the well all you want, but there's water down there too, your stereotypes notwithstanding.

Perhaps I was being too broad, when what I meant to do is point out the very different culture surrounding guns in the US as opposed to elsewhere. I didn't realize I still needed the caveat that I'm not trying to speak sweepingly about an entire group of people- I thought I'd been here long enough that it's clear I try to account for nuance in my positions- but I guess sometimes I do. Some Americans, not all.

That's sort of the problem with trying to politicize an object, I suppose: the act of doing so warps the culture around it so that a certain stripe of citizen, say, takes walking into a supermarket with an assault rifle strapped to them to be patriotic, rather than just sad. I've seen people walking around in shirts that joke about shooting advocates for gun control for being "pussies," I have this kind of right-wing person as an uncle now that I've married Luckie, I'm really not just plucking this stuff out of nowhere.