George Jonas writes:
This week, a letter-writer called me a “gun nut.” He probably got the “nut” part right, but boy, was he ever wrong about the “gun.”
I don’t hunt. I don’t shoot. I don’t own a gun. As a teenager, I traded a gift gun for a stamp. When I got guns as gifts in later life, I gave them away.
No, I’m not a gun nut. I’m a freedom nut.
It isn’t a gun I want; what I want is for my neighbour to be as free to own his gun as his father was. I have a selfish reason:
The state that can tie my neighbour’s ownership of a gun to inane conditions can similarly restrict my ownership of anything I want, including a light bulb.
Another correspondent says that, despite what I think, most Canadians agree that a gun in the home is more likely to harm its owner or a member of the family than it is to harm an intruder.
This may shock the letter-writer: Whether most Canadians agree or not, I do. It’s one reason I don’t own a gun. Except I don’t think that what I think, or the letter-writer thinks, or even most Canadians think, should invalidate the choice of any Canadian who prefers to play different odds.
If a majority of Canadians fear guns more than intruders, great. They shouldn’t keep guns. Maybe they should keep intruders. They just shouldn’t harass and persecute Canadians who fear intruders more than guns.
***
And sometimes? They’re even the Gestapo!
The other day I argued with a Canadian “conservative” male about guns.
You know how this turned out, if you are a regular reader, because you know from reading me or simply by leaving your house that Canadian “conservative” males are basically low tax liberal hawks. And this one? I’m not sure about the “low tax” since he held the well-known, highly conservative and traditional view we can trace back at least as far back as Burke, that I should be forced to pay for other people’s sex change operations through my extorted tax dollars…
In any event, my conversation with this young man, who happens to be Jewish, was aborted due to time contraints. It started out with him saying, he didn’t trust his neighbours, because he lived in a big Canadian city. Ergo, “Nobody who lives in a big city should have a gun,” he declared.
Here’s the imaginary exchange that followed:
Me: So, if you live in London, you don’t need a gun and shouldn’t have one?
Him: No!
Me: If you live in, say, Berlin, you shouldn’t be allowed to have a gun?
Him: Absolutely not!
Me: And if you lived in Berlin in, say, 1938, you don’t think one would have come in handy…?
Naturally, I don’t have his response.
