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Why Gun Culture Is So Strong in Rural America
New York Times ^ | March 16, 2018 | ROBERT LEONARD

Posted on 03/16/2018 2:16:31 PM PDT by reaganaut1

KNOXVILLE, Iowa — As Democrats have fled rural America — or rural America has fled Democrats — many of them, living in cities, are left without an understanding of rural culture and its core values. If it isn’t on abortion, our deepest cultural divide might be on guns. The guns issue also has a profound political dimension, reliably driving rural Americans into Republican arms.

It’s been many years since I hunted squirrels and rabbits with my Grandpa Leonard. I grew up around guns and remember the pride I had when I completed my N.R.A.-sponsored gun safety training in Boy Scouts, back when the N.R.A. was a group primarily known for teaching gun appreciation and safety rather than lobbying.

I have come to understand and appreciate arguments for more gun control. But guns are important to the culture in my conservative community in Iowa, and people around here reject most gun control legislation. So I do my best to understand where they are coming from.

One morning after the mass shootings in Parkland, Fla., I spoke about them with a police-officer friend. He has led active-shooter trainings in our schools. He believes that better background checks might help prevent some gun violence, and that people need to do a better job securing their firearms (especially from suicidal teenagers).

But he doesn’t believe that significant gun control measures will ever meet approval in rural America, including a ban on AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles. He confided that many conservative police officers do not want more gun control and that other officers have told him that should they ever have to start taking guns away from people, they will quit their jobs. Like most rural conservatives, he truly believes that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens will never solve America’s gun problems, including mass shootings.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; US: Iowa
KEYWORDS: banglist; bitterclingers; democrats; fakenews; guncontrol; guns
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To: reaganaut1

What “gun culture”


21 posted on 03/16/2018 2:36:14 PM PDT by BenLurkin (The above is not a statement of fact. It is either satire or opinion. Or both.)
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To: Snickering Hound

I’m guessing not guilty.

5.56mm


22 posted on 03/16/2018 2:37:38 PM PDT by M Kehoe
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To: reaganaut1
Throwing around statistics on shooting deaths in America will not make rural gun owners give up their guns.

No, but the statistics should make liberals give up their gun control ideas.

Make no mistake: These statistics and the deaths behind them sadden rural gun owners just as much as they sadden you.

I guess the NYT as least knows that not many rural people read their paper.

23 posted on 03/16/2018 2:38:02 PM PDT by libertylover (Kurt Schlicter: "They wonder why they got Trump. They are why they got Trump")
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To: reaganaut1

Grew up in the Bronx to Davy Crockett and Wyatt and Hickock and all the tv westerns. Dad had been a WW 2 marine and was NYPD. He help me feed my need for all things Guns.
Sorry NY Slimes. I had other friends growing up in NYC who we’re gun aficionados. Not as much as country boys but we were a definite presence.


24 posted on 03/16/2018 2:38:29 PM PDT by Vaquero (Don't pick a fight with an old guy. If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you)
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To: reaganaut1

Not one sentence in that article that maybe Grampa Bob and his rural friends view guns as a way to keep the tyranny of govt out of their face. Or that urban and suburban dwellers are pretty heavily armed themselves. Just another pro gun control article trying not to look like it.


25 posted on 03/16/2018 2:38:37 PM PDT by Georgia Girl 2 (The only purpose of a pistol is to fight your way back to the rifle you should never have dropped)
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To: Blue Jays

Rodger that!


26 posted on 03/16/2018 2:38:59 PM PDT by MCF (If my home can't be my Castle, then it will be my Alamo.)
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To: reaganaut1

We grew up hunting and that is just the way it was. We ate what we killed unless it was vermin. We recognized that a firearm is just an instrument and a tool. It could be used for hunting or protection.

I have multiple degrees in the hard sciences. I am not a troglodyte as the left wing would like to portray me. A weapon is a tool and not the problem.

Oddly West Virginia is economically depressed and has one of the highest rates of firearm possession in the United States and one of the lowest murder rates in the United States. I would really like liberal pundits to explain this.


27 posted on 03/16/2018 2:39:38 PM PDT by cpdiii
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To: Snickering Hound

Did she hit the target? Does anyone know if there was a target? Does anyone care if there is a target?


28 posted on 03/16/2018 2:41:11 PM PDT by Vaquero (Don't pick a fight with an old guy. If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you)
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To: reaganaut1

?

Now do “Why the Constitution is so Hated in NY Times Culture”.

“Gun Culture”. BS. This is the law of the land, you liberal hacks. (not you reaganaut, I think you know I am addressing the liberal HACKS who wrote the headline...)


29 posted on 03/16/2018 2:41:50 PM PDT by SoFloFreeper
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To: reaganaut1

Because liberals are unable to survive without 20+ Starbucks within a 2 block radius, leaving rural America relatively uninfected by their idiocy.


30 posted on 03/16/2018 2:42:43 PM PDT by LIConFem (I will no longer accept the things I cannot change. it's time to change the things I cannot accept.)
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To: Vaquero

I recall reading a piece from John Lott a few years ago in which he discussed that until about the early 1970s, many public high schools in New York City had rifle/shooting clubs for students. Typically, the head of the Phys Ed department was in charge of the club and kept the guns locked in a storage area right near his office. Do you have recollections of this?


31 posted on 03/16/2018 2:42:55 PM PDT by OttawaFreeper ("If I had to go to war again, I'd bring lacrosse players" Conn Smythe)
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To: reaganaut1

Cuz we think you guys are turds.


32 posted on 03/16/2018 2:45:16 PM PDT by bboop (does not suffer fools gladly)
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To: MNJohnnie
Gun control is just part of the problem.

It's magical thinking: they just really believe that if well-intentioned people like themselves just pass a law to make something happen, it will magically happen.

This is despite the fact that every day they will see (or will themselves do): jaywalking, speeding, throwing trash in streets, a gazillion building code violations, etc., etc.

Somehow, by magic, new laws and more governmental power will fix everything.

It's like a cargo cult for despotism driven by childish wish fulfillment.

33 posted on 03/16/2018 2:45:20 PM PDT by pierrem15 ("Massacrez-les, car le seigneur connait les siens")
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To: SoFloFreeper

And for 30+ years I was told there is no criminal enterprise involving the exploitation of children by even those representing me in DC. They lied, as usual, as today finally showed.


34 posted on 03/16/2018 2:46:55 PM PDT by no-to-illegals (..There is no difference between liberals/rinos/moslems/illegals/lamestream media ...)
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To: reaganaut1

Because fascist liberal culture is so strong in urban America.


35 posted on 03/16/2018 2:48:53 PM PDT by Vigilanteman (ObaMao: Fake America, Fake Messiah, Fake Black man. How many fakes can you fit into one Zer0?)
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To: reaganaut1
Why Gun Culture Is So Strong in Rural America   Because those are about the only places left where gratitude is still instilled for the wisdom in, and miracle of, our Constitution.
36 posted on 03/16/2018 2:50:34 PM PDT by tomkat
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To: reaganaut1
"Bocephus" addressed this rather well...

"Because you can't starve us out
And you can't make us run
'Cause we're them old boys raised on shotgun
And we say "grace" and we say "Ma'am"
And if you ain't into that we don't give a damn"

Hank Williams Jr., "A Country Boy Can Survive"

37 posted on 03/16/2018 2:52:25 PM PDT by Ciaphas Cain (Progressives are turning America into "Harrison Bergeron" as conceived by Ayn Rand.)
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To: reaganaut1; All

Someone posted that if you take out the five or ten biggest cities in the USA, all run by Demon Rats of course, the ranking of the USA as a place for violent gun death plummets to something like 170 out of 200 nations.

Can anyone verify that claim?


38 posted on 03/16/2018 2:52:42 PM PDT by SoFloFreeper
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To: OttawaFreeper

https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/01/gun-clubs-school-charles-c-w-cooke/


39 posted on 03/16/2018 2:53:58 PM PDT by Zhang Fei (Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)
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To: cpdiii

West Virginia is mostly White.


40 posted on 03/16/2018 2:56:55 PM PDT by EEGator
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