Oleg Volk
Moderator Emeritus
This came in the mail today:
hello. i hope you don't mind the long email i am sending, but i've spent
enough time on your site to respect you enough to send my personal thoughts.
i come from a background that i think may be different than yours, so
please, up front i will say that my only intention is to learn more and
better communication. if anything i say you find disrepectful, please know
it's unintentional, and please let me know what it is so cannot make the
same mistake. hopefully, it won't come to that. thank you for your time:
i come from a community where we've been treating gun owners as fools and
gun ownership as foolish. that the people who are into guns are wacks,
stupid, uneducated, with no morals. but a lot of the anti-gun control sites
- like this one http://www.a-human-right.com/views2.html - are in no way
made by idiots. or fools. these are people who know how to get their
message across. clearly. persuasively. addictively.
gun rights advocates have many well-articulated points, so regardless of
whether or not we would agree with them, just calling them ignorant red neck
hicks makes you look like you're not capable of carrying out the same
persuasive arguments for the cause you posit to be supporting. it's
ignorant to consider them ignorant.
there's a strong possibility that michael moore, in bowling for columbine,
was right when he asked "why, when all other factors are equal, does the us
have such a higher gun-crime rate than other places?"
while he does give portraits of many "fanatic" gun owners - plenty of whom
were completely ridiculed in the movie as being out of their mind - and
although he takes this negative slant on them, he does make it obvious that
those people are much more "paranoid" than they are "out to get people" -
these people apparently get guns "because other people have them who are bad
people"
who are these bad people? or maybe, like michael moore points out, it's
the amount of fear that exists in the us media. the immense amount of fear.
maybe fear speeds up the progress of exploiters. the exploiters break a
rule, the paranoids wonder "what other rules can these exploiters break" and
then make list of 50 rules that can be broken, explicitly describing how
they can be broken. then twenty exploiters get a hold of that list of 50
rules, and break all of them. "thanks folks. thanks for the help" does
naming something destroy it? i thought, in fact, it's the exact opposite.
a name equals birth.
this is long way of getting to the point, that maybe gun-control advocates
should think about what it is they really want. is it control of guns? or
is it control of the thing that causes gun abuse? maybe they're the same
thing? maybe they're completely separate? without the answers to this
question, there's is something that can be said for sure: we don't know the
answer.
and our goal is not the elimination of guns. it shouldn't be. so we should
not look at gun owners as enemies. because only as enemies can they be
murderers and cult fanatics. what's the divide? what's truly legitimate in
their arguments? where are the delusions, or assumptions, or
subjectifications? if they cannot see them, and we're trying to enlighten
them, shouldn't we be able to see the difference between illusion and truth
first? how can we teach what we, in fact, really do not know?
or maybe another question is, what do we - (those who feel that there is
_something_ not quite right with the state of guns) - believe in that
actually is valid? we can't all be idiots who know nothing, can we? maybe
the solution lies somewhere undiscovered, that can only come about with
better understanding and ciphening out of both sides' arguments.
let's forget about total gun control. and let's forget about "what are our
rights." instead let's share a common vision. let's agree in some kind of
common goal: less gun murders. less gun-related deaths/injuries due to
accident.
if neither the gun control advocated nor the gun right advocates are the
people committing the crimes, then what is the point of us arguing with each
other? i would appreciate any response, thank you for your time.
--------------
I'll point the author to this thread. Already sent some comments back.
hello. i hope you don't mind the long email i am sending, but i've spent
enough time on your site to respect you enough to send my personal thoughts.
i come from a background that i think may be different than yours, so
please, up front i will say that my only intention is to learn more and
better communication. if anything i say you find disrepectful, please know
it's unintentional, and please let me know what it is so cannot make the
same mistake. hopefully, it won't come to that. thank you for your time:
i come from a community where we've been treating gun owners as fools and
gun ownership as foolish. that the people who are into guns are wacks,
stupid, uneducated, with no morals. but a lot of the anti-gun control sites
- like this one http://www.a-human-right.com/views2.html - are in no way
made by idiots. or fools. these are people who know how to get their
message across. clearly. persuasively. addictively.
gun rights advocates have many well-articulated points, so regardless of
whether or not we would agree with them, just calling them ignorant red neck
hicks makes you look like you're not capable of carrying out the same
persuasive arguments for the cause you posit to be supporting. it's
ignorant to consider them ignorant.
there's a strong possibility that michael moore, in bowling for columbine,
was right when he asked "why, when all other factors are equal, does the us
have such a higher gun-crime rate than other places?"
while he does give portraits of many "fanatic" gun owners - plenty of whom
were completely ridiculed in the movie as being out of their mind - and
although he takes this negative slant on them, he does make it obvious that
those people are much more "paranoid" than they are "out to get people" -
these people apparently get guns "because other people have them who are bad
people"
who are these bad people? or maybe, like michael moore points out, it's
the amount of fear that exists in the us media. the immense amount of fear.
maybe fear speeds up the progress of exploiters. the exploiters break a
rule, the paranoids wonder "what other rules can these exploiters break" and
then make list of 50 rules that can be broken, explicitly describing how
they can be broken. then twenty exploiters get a hold of that list of 50
rules, and break all of them. "thanks folks. thanks for the help" does
naming something destroy it? i thought, in fact, it's the exact opposite.
a name equals birth.
this is long way of getting to the point, that maybe gun-control advocates
should think about what it is they really want. is it control of guns? or
is it control of the thing that causes gun abuse? maybe they're the same
thing? maybe they're completely separate? without the answers to this
question, there's is something that can be said for sure: we don't know the
answer.
and our goal is not the elimination of guns. it shouldn't be. so we should
not look at gun owners as enemies. because only as enemies can they be
murderers and cult fanatics. what's the divide? what's truly legitimate in
their arguments? where are the delusions, or assumptions, or
subjectifications? if they cannot see them, and we're trying to enlighten
them, shouldn't we be able to see the difference between illusion and truth
first? how can we teach what we, in fact, really do not know?
or maybe another question is, what do we - (those who feel that there is
_something_ not quite right with the state of guns) - believe in that
actually is valid? we can't all be idiots who know nothing, can we? maybe
the solution lies somewhere undiscovered, that can only come about with
better understanding and ciphening out of both sides' arguments.
let's forget about total gun control. and let's forget about "what are our
rights." instead let's share a common vision. let's agree in some kind of
common goal: less gun murders. less gun-related deaths/injuries due to
accident.
if neither the gun control advocated nor the gun right advocates are the
people committing the crimes, then what is the point of us arguing with each
other? i would appreciate any response, thank you for your time.
--------------
I'll point the author to this thread. Already sent some comments back.
