politics

Allowing the enemy to be the only group who is armed and trained is not very bright position your friends are taking. A lot of leftist are armed because we know that all these threats that the right keeps making towards us are serious

Been a liberal gun owner for a decade. Once in a while, I go to a range and these numbnuts want to talk politics thinking I'm "on their side". Like no dude, I'm here to practice to protect myself from people like you!

That's okay. I live in a state where the main sponsor of banning assault weapons has gone out shooting the very same weapons.

Something that may help is explaining that gun control policy originated as a means of disarming minorities, specifically black people.

Black Panthers in Oakland, CA would open carry and follow cops around whenever they came into black neighborhoods, in an attempt to curtail the rampant police brutality black people regularly endured. Naturally, a bunch of old white 2A-loving Republicans (including the fucking NRA) didn't like that, and altogether signed off on the Mulford Act, the first major gun control legislation in the country, supported by "2A advocates" (read, in this instance: racists) for the sole purpose of better allowing police to terrorize black citizens.

I was once pretty strongly anti-gun too (less for political reasons and more because I saw a guy get his chest blown out at work when I was in my early 20s), but the knowledge that the true intention underpinning gun control and anti-gun legislation has always been to disarm and weaken marginalized communities changed my mind.

Not sure it will help with your friends, but idk. Worth a try maybe.

They are terrifying things to admit to yourself. Hold on to that feeling, but train anyways. Because those thoughts will keep you from becoming like those republicans who gleefully wave their guns around and talk about shooting all the people they don’t like. And the training means you can protect yourself and others.

Guns are a tool that kills things, and so you never pick one up unless you intend to kill. But sometimes, regrettably, you have to.

I’m admitting something about this country and myself that I don’t want to admit.

Don't feel bad, a lot of us have been down this road. I've done it several times.

We never stop learning difficult truths about the world around us.

I think the day you stop having these shifts in your attitude is the day you've finally stopped caring enough to actually self-examine, so it means you're still alive and conscious if nothing else.

I hope if nothing else, you and your grandfather make memories together. We don't always get to choose how and what kind of bonding memories we make with family, but take what you can when you can. It will be over soon enough.

If nothing else, target shooting is a lot of fun and you get a new hobby out of it.

They don't want "gun control". They want "justification for their use of force".

Trump would have loved if Alex Pretti had actually pulled his gun and landed a few shots before he was taken down. He'd have loved if Renee Good had actually hit an ICE agent with her car. These events could have served to justify their draconian misconduct, at least within his own conservative base.

Tightening gun laws to the point where all the regulations around private ownership don't matter is about explaining away why you can pop someone in the head while crossing the street and claim they were breaking the law after the fact. It isn't about restricting gun ownership. There's virtually no fear among these federal agencies that any liberal group might organize an effective military deterrence. Nobody is actually afraid of the "liberal gun owner", because individual lone wolf gun owners aren't an effective opposition to a well-organized and well-funded Gestapo.