How Guns Are Perceived

There is a blogger I read, although I don’t know why. This guy is a flaming fucking idiot. He has been a “travel writer” for the New York Times and he considers himself something of an expert on all things travel-related, including aviation. And now, evidently, guns. He writes a lot about guns. Most of what he writes is pure, Class A bullshit. He routinely mixes up fully-automatic weapons with semi-autos, leading his readers who may not know any better to assume that all “assault rifles” are fully-automatic machine guns or that a semi-automatic rifle can fire bullets any faster than my semi-auto pistol - neither of which is true.

His latest scribblings concern the newspaper up north that published the names of all gun permit holders in a given county. Here is what the blogger wrote:

“The newspaper has exhibited no sign that it is truly interested in reporting on genuine gun issues, such as the proliferation of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines, or the disturbing gun culture…”

First of all, can SOMEONE please tell me what an “assault weapon” is and how it differs from a regular rifle?

Let’s take bullets! The Bushmaster .223 fires what is basically a .22 caliber round that measures…sit down now…5.7 millimeters in diameter. Just over FIVE MILLIMETERS. Do you understand how small this is? Now, admittedly, any gun can kill and it was a .22 caliber handgun that was used to kill Senator Bobby Kennedy. So I’m not saying that a .22 is not deadly. It’s just that in the grand scheme of things the .22 round is tiny.

And granted, the rifle bullet is propelled at a high rate of speed, yes. Muzzle velocity of guns like the Bushmaster/AR-15 are around 2,700 to 3,700 feet per second depending on the weight of the round selected. Bullets within the same caliber often come in different sizes (weights).

But now let’s look at handguns. My Glock pistol fires a .40 caliber bullet that measures 10mm, almost twice the diameter of the .223 round. My Glock is loaded with hollowpoint ammo which is designed to “mushroom” and expend its energy when it hits an object. The bullet comes out of the barrel at somewhere around 1,000 to 1,200 feet per second. This is comparatively slower than the rifle, but just as deadly at close range, perhaps even more so and certainly not less so.

FYI, the diameter of a .45 caliber bullet is 11.5mm. Most .45 caliber pistols hold eight rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber.

And people are worried about “assault weapon” bullets? Really? It’s silly.

Okay, let’s move on to the high-capacity magazine objection. As I have said many, many times, the solution to any law that restricts magazine capacity is to simply carry extra loaded magazines. Problem solved! Perpetrators of “mass shootings” plan these things out. They don’t just impulsively grab the nearest AR-15 and go shoot up a mall or a movie theatre or a school.

Finally, there is what the blogger referred to as the “disturbing gun culture” in this country. He disparagingly refers to gun owners as “gun-nuts.” What he is saying is that anyone who owns a gun must therefore be crazy.

I would love a world that is peaceful…a benevolent utopian paradise where everyone is simply concerned with the benefits of “the tribe” and looks out for the welfare of one another. How wonderful that would be! A world in which there were no crazy people nor violent acts…a world where guns were never invented.

But I don’t live in such a world. I live in the real world. And in the real world, there are bad people. Crazy people. And some of them have guns. Trying to keep those guns out of their hands is simply ludicrous. Impossible.

Our “disturbing gun culture” goes right back to the very beginning of this country. We wrestled this land from the British, and the way we did it was with guns in the hands of ordinary citizens. As a nation we have grown up knowing the gun as a tool for self-defense, hunting and sport. To call it a “disturbing gun culture” exhibits a colossal lack of understanding of the people that make up America.

I guess that everybody in the U.S. lives in a big city now…in supposedly “civilized” areas where the perceived need for a gun is small and people who own guns can be looked down upon as “gun-nuts.” Yeah. Tell that to the teachers and students who were cowering in abject fear for their lives as a madman with a rifle worked his way through their school killing people indiscriminately and without opposition.

Now tell me how ANY new law that makes guns harder for law-abiding citizens to own would have prevented that from happening.