While visiting Wisconsin, I went out to dinner with some of my favorite relatives. Pat is my cousin, and Dan is her husband. They are wonderful people, competent, smart, careful, considerate and polite. Dan retired a couple of years ago. Pat is still working. Dan is a boating enthusiast, keeps himself in great shape, and participates in 50 mile bike races. They have a vacation home on a nice lake only a few miles from the property where I grew up. I made a point to contact them when I came up to Wisconsin, and we made a point to have dinner together. Their primary home is in Madison. Familial love is not too strong a word to describe our relationship.
When we were visiting before dinner, it was natural that I wanted to share with them my enthusiasm for the Gun Watch blog and the writing that I have been doing. Dan is an excellent photographer, just becoming professional. He recently sold five images for $1500. Pictures are a large part of successful writng on the net. I gave Dan and Pat business cards for Gun Watch and recounted to them the situation with MDA stealing my picture and the death threats on the Moms Demand Action site.
The reaction was not what I expected. Dan politely indicated that he was neutral about guns, but that he thought that carrying a Glock, openly in public, was not a good idea.
All of us are ignorant, just about different things. I found that Dan and Pat were not exactly ignorant about the gun issue. It seemed more that they were not particularly interested, and they had simply taken what had been fed to them by the old media that they get their information from. Did I mention that they live in Madison? It has been described as the Berkley of the Midwest.
After we were talking for a while, I went to my room and put on the Glock that I had worn in the Fry's, so that Dan and Pat could see it. Dan was surprised that it was an ordinary pistol. He had thought that a Glock was some sort of large, extraordinary weapon. Pat insisted on talking about the dangers of people carrying around machine guns. She was surprised to learn that violent crime had fallen by half in the last couple of decades.
We found that we agreed on a lot of things. Dan had been raised in the Wisconsin gun culture. He had owned three guns when he was a teenager in Oshkosh, during the 60's. He recounted shooting in competitions in high school and going to the local quarry for plinking sessions with his friends. He remembered being able to walk into a store and buy a rifle for cash when he was in his early teens. No ID, no background check, no problems, crime rate much lower than it was after gun control was pushed so hard in the late 60's. We agreed that crime is primarily a cultural problem.
I hesitate to offer my friends the red pill. They are happy and comfortable in the false narratives about reality that they have been immersed in. Of course, it is possible that they will have a "red pill" for me. As I said, we are all ignorant about different things.
But on this issue, I am a subject matter expert. I have studied and written about it for decades. There is a reason that the other side eschews facts and logic, and relies on emotion. Facts and logic are not on their side.
©2014 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
Link to Gun Watch