That may be true among politicians, but I think the rank-and-file anti-gunner has developed that attitude largely through ignorance and/or simply not thinking the matter through.
I think you've actually got that reversed, at least in some ways. I've talked to plenty of rank-and-file anti-gunners (and used to be one). The public image of "firearms enthusiasts" has done
much to sour them to the idea of gun ownership, and in particular "scary" gun ownership ("high capacity" magazines, "assault weapons," etc.), than anything else. And for those that actually made their decision based on fear/ignorance alone, the public image of "firearms enthusiasts" is what makes them almost impossible to reason with...the kinds of people who push for unrestricted gun ownership are often the kinds of people they
don't want to own guns. Yes, they're willing to throw away the second amendment to achieve that goal.
This idea will be continued....
And the OP if I understand him correctly. Are you suggesting "lower- and working-class redneck bible-thumping hillbillies" don't deserve to own certain classes of weapons?
No, but he's saying that the tendency for those who want to own certain classes of weapons to be "lawcrbth's" is part of the reason that a lot of mainstream folks are okay with not allowing
anybody to own them.
Folks here obviously put a lot of stock in the second amendment. Including me. The problem is that certain classes of weapons, in particular "assault rifles," are not so useful for things like personal defense against criminals. They're more useful for things like keeping the government in check and protecting us from tyranny (well, that at protecting us from foreign invaders of the military persuasion...but now that we spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined that's not as much of an issue).
But to many mainstream folks, and nearly
all liberals, the form of tyranny that is perceived as most likely and thus most feared nowadays is of the religious/racist persuasion. Religious in the form of legislating Christianity, and racist primarily regarding perceived "enemies" (most likely Arabs, possibly Hispanics). And guess what: the average gun rights activist and/or firearms enthusiast is perceived as the kind of person most likely to
participate in this kind of tyranny, not use his cool new AR-15 to stop it.
And that's besides the fact that most liberals value the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th amendments over the 2nd. And it's arguable that those amendments are more necessary to a free society than the second...at least directly. The second may be necessary to protect the rest, but in recent history particularly those who most strongly support the second seem willing to compromise on the "more important" ones, especially if you can give them somebody to be scared of and/or despise. So how exactly does the second amendment protect the rest (and a free society) if the people most likely to buy the guns don't seem to
care about the rest?
So yeah, many people don't buy the whole "we need these guns to protect us from
tyranny" argument because to them the most likely tyrants in our country today are the "conservative middle class white Christian with a lot a latent racism and the impression he's being downtrodden" and the "overtly racist redneck hillbilly who's still pissed off that the South lost and that states don't have the right to decide for themselves if people should be property and women should be able vote." Or possibly "patriotic American who believes that maybe the Bill of Rights shouldn't apply if it means we can catch more terrorists."
EDIT: WA's point being, at least the way I see it, that the more inclusive we are to such people the more we are perceived as a "fringe" group who is more dangerous to freedom than losing the second amendment. The only question I have, and I posed it in the other thread, is whether these people are a vocal minority of firearms enthusiasts...or actually the majority. I mean, if we didn't include such people how many would we actually have left? At least as far as people who vehemently support the right to own more than revolvers, maybe shotguns, and maybe "hunting rifles" (if we're lucky) go.
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