"Guns Have Changed. Our Gun Laws Have Not Kept Pace."

[grantcart]

255. I spent 20 years overseas.

Ten of those years I spent in a UN organization that had people from all of those countries.

Many if not most were very conservative in their religious/political beliefs ( I was involved in refugee affairs and most of the expatriates were doctors and nurses who took 1-2 years off of their professional careers to contribute to resettling refugees from Southeast Asia after the Khmer Rouge genocide and the war in Vietnam).

Many of them, especially the Swiss were gun owners.

Many were admirers of the US in general.

None of them, and I mean not a single one, understood, admired, had sympathy for, or supported the very careless way that guns and ammunition are, purchased, stored, or used in the US and they considered the mythology of personal gun ownership in the US as something between a religious or fetish obsession.

I found the Swiss, all of whom were members of the Swiss national guard and required by law to maintain guns in their home to be the most biting in their criticism. I was told repeatedly that while gun ownership was universal that training on handling and storage of guns was also universal. They also told me that every year they had to go to the local police and re register their ammunition which they stored in a locked safe and show that the seal had not been tampered with. Any discharge of ammunition had to be accounted for by the police. (That was in the 1970-80s, I don't know if the practice has been modified, just that all of them knew exactly how many rounds they had and exactly how each round is used.)

Among all other issues there was no consensus about other parts of the US sans one: universal access to basic health care.

On both of these issues the conversation would ultimately come to the same conclusion: We don't understand how a great and good country like the US can have such a morally untenable policy, we just don't understand.

You may consider yourself well educated but your reply shows a painful ignorance on three counts:

1) It is not an Argumentum ad populum.

My point was that it wasn't simply popular or in your pejorative attempt a 'bandwagon' opinion among the people in a country, nation or culture which the word populum means but rather it was a widely held, virtually unanimous opinion held by all other civilized and developed peoples, which would be the plural populi.

You will have to find another Latin phrase that is meant to convene the idea that something is a fallacy because it is a widely held believe held over a long period of time by multiple civilizations, cultures and peoples widely disturbed across the entire world.

2) You may continue to spend your time thinking that you are doing something great and noble by participating in discussion forums defending liberal easy access for everyone to own a gun but it really is a fact that for the rest of the civilized world your support of these policies is perceived as substantive as the cultural contribution of Duck Dynasty is to the Arts.

3) Finally put aside the anecdotal of my and all other Americans who have lived overseas. The fact is that all the other well developed law abiding constitutional democratic countries have found ways to keep guns from exercising a weekly epidemic of mayhem and violence, and only the American tolerance for this river of the blood of innocents has allowed "a gun culture" to continue, however you define that word.

You may think that you are participating in an exercise of freedom, and this is where your ignorance of how the rest of the world actually operates is so significant. I have lived and travelled dozens of countries in Europe and Asia and in all of them I knew that I could travel in the seediest and darkest locations, whether remote or down by the docks in an industrial area at the middle of the night and I would never have to be worried about a personal assault.

If your are even semi aware as an American when you leave your domicile you have some part of your thinking that is taking precautionary steps because an incidental car accident or simply a malevolent character can take over your space and your life in an instant, in a place that is secure in the middle of the day. Those seedy and dark locations, both remote and in the urban area, well no thinking American goes to those places in the middle of the night.

That freedom of simply being able to walk down any street at any time in a completely relaxed and free frame of mind is a freedom that Americans have lost, probably forever.

But relax because there are so many obsessed single issue folks like yourself that are willing to 'go to war' on any perceived modest attempt to gain control of this mayhem, progressives like me that would like to see a change will not engage the issue, we lose too much political equity on too many other issues.

So having won the battle, won the war and left with only minor symbolic policy changes why do you still invest so much time exercising your fingers on the issue if it doesn't lie in a misplaced possibly paranoid obsession very much like the way that the Europeans, Australians, Canadians, Japanese, et al. perceive? Because outside of the US the well educated civilized 'masses' that you seem to be laughing at by your grammatically incorrect use of argumentam ad numeram think of you : morally challenged, intellectually stunted, and emotionally obsessed.