Thursday, March 06, 2008

A peek inside the mindset

So I'm talking to a guy at work the other day. Moved here after having lived in New York City. He lived there when crime was really bad. Nice guy.

I asked him if it was frustrating not being allowed to defend himself. You know, by carrying a gun.

His reaction surprised me. The gist of what he said was that gang members and people who killed their girlfriends had guns. Respectable people did not.

It took a minute for me to interpret what he actually said into that, but that's basically what he was saying. Wow.

So in this mindset, simply having a gun puts you in the same class as gang members and murderers. The gun itself is a cultural signifier -- and in his crowd it signified criminality. Or possibly "Bubba-ality".

No wonder they want to "get rid of them".

They still don't get, apparently, that there are laws against robbery, against armed robbery, against murder, against selling drugs on the street. And those laws don't stop these people from doing these things. Why do they think a law against getting a gun would stop them from having one?

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