Are you considering purchasing a gun?

ILX 2020: Are you considering downprinting a gun?

Y'all know that many people make their own ammunition - melting metals, using molds, adding powder - right?

A kit to make your own bullets costs like $250 or something.

can't beat the taste of homemade bullets hot from the barrel just like grandma made

the shop-bought ones just don't kill the same

gun nuts are probably all going to die from lead poisoning anyway

i could consider owning a gun (of whatever type) because, well, history can turn in some ugly directions and i could imagine it being a useful skill to have. right-wing boogeymen of rampaging crime or tyrannical gov't don't mean anything to me, but if you add up political and economic sclerosis, a fractured angry society and climate change, the chances of a general breakdown in stability sometime in my lifetime are... not zero.

not that being able to shoot means you'd survive any of that. we all probably watch too many movies.

however i think it's possible (shows what i know?) to own a gun but store it offsite, at a range? i don't want one in the house.

This will sound simplistic and dumb but I want to live in a world where I don't feel like I need a gun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX9rN7li8Sg

Do you mean world or country?

Yeah, I should of wrote country.

I grew up with a gun-nut grandfather, and am kind of happy he passed before the fox news era as it would probably have seriously tainted my thoughts about him. He kept a tiny, allegedly illegal .25 in his office desk, a loaded police-style (shorter barrel, higher capacity, absolutely not for hunting) shotgun in the closet at my house when he lived with me, taught me to make homemade silencers, and once told my uncle to act cool when they got pulled over because he had a handgun under the seat and sure as hell wasn't going to tell the cop about it.

My wife's family is full of avid hunters, the kind of people that don't really oppose sensible gun control, use guns as tools to pursue a hobby, and get mad when people assume they're like fetishists like my grandfather.

So I was super familiar with them grew up with a healthy respect, but don't hunt and have never had a need for one. I thought about buying one after the election, just out out of sheer gut-reaction fear and terror but doubht I will. I want my son to learn to shoot to demystify guns and understand the seriousness one needs in handling them, but I'm more worried about him finding it in the house when he gets older. And if all the actual nazis a couple hours east of here ever come to purge the intellectuals from the university where I work, they're going to be way more heavily armed than I would be.

I do think it would kind of funny to write a clickbaity "Liberals should stockpile guns" thinkpiece to get people riled up. And I am getting my kid a passport - Canada's only a couple hours north.

guns aren't really mysterious nor does one need to learn how to shoot them in order to take them seriously

(sorry)

i've definitely thought about buying a gun before because i think about all kinds of things

I grew up around hunters and was forced to hunt as a kid. Almost all of my coworkers hunt and a few stockpile guns. I'm not afraid of guns. I know an equal amount of people who hate guns and love them and it squarely follows party lines/who they voted for, at least in my experience. I do feel like it might be good to buy one in the future and I don't like that feeling.

guns aren't really mysterious nor does one need to learn how to shoot them in order to take them seriously

I don't know, every time guns come up her or in real life conversations at least some number of people who have never handled or fired one seem to see guns as scary/foreign/confusing/evil, like they're dark magic of some sort. And people who teach target shooting or hunter's safety, are, in my experience, incredibly concerned with safety and hammer safe gun-handling practices into students constantly.

every time guns come up her or in real life conversations at least some number of people who have never handled or fired one seem to see guns as scary/foreign/confusing/evil

Maybe because guns are scary?

they are for killing living things after all

Indeed, I mean, I'm not too fond of landmines either.

people are scared of what they do not know

also more and more people live in urban areas where they're scared of how a sausage is made

buddy charcuterie is huge around my way

This will sound simplistic and dumb but I want to live in a world where I don't feel like I need a gun.

― JacobSanders, Tuesday, November 22, 2016 5:59 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have gotten along well without needing one for 38 years. I still do not really feel like I need one, but there is now a looming cloud of doubt.

Consume less media

Lol goole

If civil society breaks down and wild hoardes are after me I think I'd be cool with just dying

^^

Luckily none of that is happening folks

I have a family to worry about, just dying isn't an option. I'm not saying I think anything is on the horizon. But.

Wouldn't want family to be around for post apocalyptic hellscape either

Just gonna bump cormac McCarthy thread altogether ffs

The other day I was talking to my wife about who would not take orders if things got bad and my first instinct/thought was our military would never take orders against the people. Then I saw my step brothers postings on Facebook. Both are military lifers, one a navy seal medic and the other is robotics/army. Both are sympathetic to white nationalist ideas. It was a scary moment for me.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/65/Kent_State_massacre.jpg

People owning handguns is the second-most scary thing about the USA.

Go on

never owning a gun because the statistics say it's much more likely to be used on someone i care about/accidentally than against some fantastical bad guy, and anyone who owns one has to reconcile that. there is no moral case for owning a gun.

however i think it's possible (shows what i know?) to own a gun but store it offsite, at a range? i don't want one in the house.

I don't keep ammo at my house (not for any particular objection - I don't need it and) but I have a small safe bolted to the floor in a closet. It's about as secure as it could be if anyone broke in.

essentially my threshold for owning a gun is when i'm living in an active war zone

what on earth would I do with it? even in a nightmare scenario it wouldn't make me safer

or like if all civil society broke down and i had to defend my homestead against raiders

Is it interesting to ponder how ilx would view the type of discourse it has engaged in since trump's victory had it appeared on an equivalent right wing message board in an alternate universe where Clinton won

I'm stocking up on guns and bunkering up lads

druther muh kids were DEAD than living under this regime

Would Clinton supporters be painting "hang the capitalists" in schoolyards and parks, or stopping randos on the street to yell, "Your time is up, ofay?"

xpost to darraghmac - i don't think anybody has yet copped to buying a gun?

I know how to use a gun, I don't have any interest in owning one. Another expensive appliance to maintain, and mostly just to make it a lot easier for everyone in my house to commit suicide, apparently? Nah.

If someone comes into my home and threatens my family with a firearm, my chances of disarming and disabling them with random kitchen implements or my giant fuckoff t-ball bat sized maglite seem about even with the winning-a-gunfight scenario. I'll take shit I don't need a license to own for $0 / sunk costs, Alex.

Would Clinton supporters be painting "hang the capitalists" in schoolyards and parks, or stopping randos on the street to yell, "Your time is up, ofay?"

― and this section is called boner (Phil D.)

quit giving us ideas

seriously is there a white person in history who has ever been threatened by being called "ofay"?

I'm white, a pacifist and a vegetarian, and live in a country where a person like me would pretty much never need a gun for self-defense, so I've never ever considered owning a gun for any purpose. I'm also absent-minded and have butter fingers, so I don't think it'd be even safe for me to be around one.

Finland does have a lot of guns (as do the other Nordic countries, based on that Wikipedia link above all except Denmakr are in the top 20 for private gun ownership), but the majority of them are for hunting. Gun violence against humans is rare, and in most cases it's happened when someone's gone crazy and targeted their family or school or workplace.

As in most of Western Europe, racism and xenophobia is on the rise, so I'm a bit afraid about that, because they are more prominent in rural areals and impoverished industrial towns, where I think gun ownership is also more common (due to the fact that hunting is more common there). Here in Helsinki I've never met anyone who'd own a gun.

Sorry, I'm not sure why I put "Western Europe" there, since it feels like racism is on the rise pretty much everywhere in Europe.

I take it that non-US respondents to the poll would just be adding noise?

for me personally no, I couldn't, but as a lifelong "fuck all guns" dude it was an unusual feeling this week to find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the specifically gun-related stuff I used to struggle with in 60s black radical theory/texts -- about how black people should arm themselves and vigorously defend themselves, using firepower when necessary, against the violent, racist police state

like when I used to read that stuff I'd think "I hear you but that's only going to make shit worse" and my feeling now is "no, it won't, people should protect themselves and their families and it's moral and righteous to kill people who're coming for your family"