Politics
- Why the South Loves Guns – The Daily Beast
Southerners worship firearms as the ultimate anti-government symbol—which is why they will never accept gun control, no matter how many children die.
Since hideous, unspeakable gun massacres are such a regular occurrence in this country, I’ve had the several opportunities to live the cycle of horror, outrage, argument, recrimination, and inaction that engulfs the Internet each time. It usually goes something like this: I share a couple of links in the heat of the moment, and dissenters—many of them Southern friends and relatives—come out of the woodwork to debate. The responses are as predictable as my anti-gun links: “guns don’t kill, people do”; “if someone had had a gun, maybe they could have stopped this”; “more guns make people safer”; “taking guns away from law-abiding people means only criminals will have guns.”
No matter how I attempt to rebut these empty slogans, they never lose their power. On Friday, the horror of imagining small children gunned down in their classrooms with an assault rifle, the images of their parents screaming in despair, didn’t seem to do one bit to persuade any of the usual suspects that maybe citizens having unlimited access to assault weapons isn’t the best idea. It was sobering: the desperate denial, the contorted excuses. I spent most of the day wondering, if this won’t change people’s minds, will anything? (read the compplete article…)
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