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 ...
What “gun culture”
I’m guessing not guilty.
5.56mm
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.
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.
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.
Rodger that!
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.
Did she hit the target? Does anyone know if there was a target? Does anyone care if there is a target?
?
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...)
Because liberals are unable to survive without 20+ Starbucks within a 2 block radius, leaving rural America relatively uninfected by their idiocy.
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?
Cuz we think you guys are turds.
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.
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.
Because fascist liberal culture is so strong in urban America.
"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"
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?
West Virginia is mostly White.
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