Gun control

[Zazzy]

<sigh...> I don't really know the answer to this. I mean, I remember playing cops and robbers with the neighborhood kids when I was little, and we all pretended we had guns and shot at everything in sight. But they were just our fingers, or some silly toy -- and we did know the difference. In my household, we grew up with loaded guns leaned in out-of-the-way corners. We knew not to touch them -- period.

I personally do not remember playing like this, but it was along time ago. I mostly played fairies straight out of LOTR- I was a weird kid.

It is disturbing that the research cited in the article shows that so many kids (boys, usually), even with gun safety training, will play with a gun.

I don't know how to address this, either. I think it would help if both sides would start to honestly address it without anger and false rhetoric.

We made huge inroads into discouraging people from smoking by educating them as to the terrible dangers of it as well as making it socially uncomfortable. Might we do something similar with the gun culture? I think if it is approached in a reasonable way, there are gains to be made. Just a thought. It's a big problem, and the prongs of solution are multitude.

This is a good, and encouraging, point. Things can change very fast culturally if the right message is found. We should keep trying to frame it correctly, I guess.

I don't reflexively blame the gun.

It's more complicated than that for me, and I think for you, too. It's blaming a whole culture that doesn't THINK about these things, or teach parents to think about them without getting hysterical.

I'd be interested to hear your further thoughts on this. I guess what I was trying to say is, I'm less concerned with the method chosen to facilitate a suicide than I am with the underlying reason why so many feel the need to kill themselves in the first place. But that's another whole discussion.

I think we just can't talk about it reasonably. I'm 42, and this is the first reasonable conversation- in life OR on the internet- I've ever had about it with a gun owner. Everyone is convinced the other person is lying, or an idiot, and it goes nowhere from the beginning. Scary stats are reasons to panic, on either side. We don't THINK; we just react. And some of that is understandable when we are talking about dead children. But we still are almost never communicating honestly.

And you're probably right that the suicide discussion is tangential.

Even if it was all made illegal tomorrow, you'd never get those folks to surrender those arms.

That scares me. Not that I think guns will be made illegal- they won't- but that such violence is always around the corner.

The knee-jerk resistance to background checks, etc., seems to come from a highly emotional place rather than one of reason.

So you have not heard good, reasonable arguments, even through the emotion, from the others? Or is it really as crazy as it appears?

Thank you. In general, I support gun control and virtually all of what it hopes to accomplish. I do draw the line when anti-gun folks call for the elimination of all guns in all possible situations.

Well, this is nonsense, and almost everybody knows it. I guess it is enough to shut down communication, although that's a shame.

One more question: If Obama called you tomorrow and put you in charge of the task force to propose practical gun control, what would that proposal look like?