Why is "gun guilt" transferable?

[Nuclear Unicorn]

By "gun guilt" I mean the moral and/or legal onus for misdeeds to one's self or others committed with a gun.

I know of no other instance where the misuse or abuse of an object is inferred to all other users of the product. Social drinkers are not held accountable for traffic accidents, violent crimes and sexual assaults committed by those who committed their acts under the influence of alcohol. Prescription drug users are not blamed for the misdeeds of pharmaceutical drug abusers.

So, why the transferable guilt?

[JonathanRackham]

1. Like religious symbols, guns are social symbols.

Love or hate a flag, it's just a symbol.

[CompanyFirstSergeant]

2. Transferrable...

a drinker in a bar is expected to have a sober friend or money for a cab. If he sat at the bar and said ' fuggg thisss shee-it, "I'm driving home...' I certainly hope his friends (and the bar staff) would be all over him even though it is not a crime to sit at a bar and sound like an A-hole.

I had a prescription for some pretty powerful stuff after I crushed my finger on a construction site. It felt weird having a bottle of the stuff (I only took one pill) laying around, and I finally took it to a household waste disposal day. There is an epidemic of abuse of that stuff, and it is talked about on the radio a lot here. Getting so many more pills than I needed in that prescription - and knowing theoretically how easy it would be to sell the stuff - did make me feel odd.

Politicians (especially anti-gun governors of states with a large pro-gun minority) are very good at making their gun owning constituents feel like pariahs.

[ileus]

3. It's the old 2A double standard, where taking rights is considered "progressive"

[pablo_marmol]

4. "I know of no other instance..........."

This group of words could lead any number of sentences relating to gun restriction theory, couldn't it?

I know of no other instance where "progressives" invoke the 'needs' argument.

I know of no other instance where otherwise intelligent persons believe that correlation equals causation.

I know of no other instance where otherwise compassionate persons show disregard for the safety of seniors and disabled persons.

I know of no other instance where invocation of relevant facts is spun into "gagging on minutia".

I know of no other instance where otherwise tolerant people display contempt for a sizable percentage of citizens that they've never met.

And on...........and on...........and on.......................

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

5. As Jacob's ghost said...

..."I wear the guilt I forged in life."

[benEzra]

6. Actually, the fundamentalists did hold social drinkers as responsible for drunk driving

and the ~50,000-100,000 alcohol related deaths annually. Just read the writings and speech transcripts of Carrie Nation, or Billy Sunday, or whoever.

The fundies were wrong, but that's the mentality people have when they get on a self-righteous moral crusade against what they deem sinful.

There is a huge amount of overlap between the rhetoric of the alcohol prohibition movement and the gun prohibition movement, in terms of rhetoric, hatred for responsible partakers of the "sin" in question, legislative goals, and apathy toward negative second-order effects of their proposed legislation. The alcohol prohibitionists viewed social drinkers who were blinded or killed by methanol-spiked alcohol as acceptable collateral damage, and sometimes praised as a lesson to "those people"; the extreme violence created by the "War on Alcohol" was viewed similarly. Much of that rhetoric and tactics carried over to the War on Drugs, the War on Contraception (remember the Comstock Laws?), and the War on Guns.

The only difference is that gun owners are a lot more organized and politically active than social drinkers were, which is why we have been quite a bit more successful even though alcohol prohibition and gun prohibition draw about the same level of popular support. It also helps that gun ownership and carrying is a specifically enumerated constitutional right, whereas alcohol consumption wasn't specifically listed because no one seriously thought it would ever be questioned.

[Lizzie Poppet]

7. It's basically the same as blaming all Muslims for Islamist terror, all blacks for black gangs.

Things I suspect most of the people doing it get spitting mad about...