Just take a guess given the source and the title what his drive will be.
Perhaps the "I'm a gun owner but..." Someone who says he owns guns but they're all for hunting. Someone that talks about how "middle of the road" they are. Someone that protests that "I'm not a gun nut!". Someone who can't see why someone could ever Need those scary assault weapons and those high capacity bullets?
You'd be close. Amazingly, he does talk about conceal carry and self defense in a fairly positive light.
And he also notes the absurdities that gun owners live under.
On talking about his CCW class and the laws and jurisdictions he had to keep in mind:
It's flattering being recruited into an ethos of responsibility. It makes you want to walk the line. It also reminds you how arbitrary some lines are. Cross the wrong state border with your gun or wake up one morning to new legislation or a new presidential executive order, and suddenly you're the bad guy, not the good guy. No wonder some gun owners seem so touchy; they feel, at some level, like criminals in waiting. This feeling helps promote a bond. "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns," says the cussed old right-wing bumper sticker. Perhaps there should be another one that says: "If guns are outlawed, there will be a lot more outlaws."
All well and good. But this is also a guy that repeatedly insists he's not a traitor. His word.
And then he ends with this:
Of the five or six guns I've gathered over the decades (IF YOU KNOW HOW MANY GUNS YOU HAVE, YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH read a t-shirt I saw once) only one is designed to use on human beings: a .38 revolver of the type that burdened policemen's sagging belts once, before the adoption of sleeker 9mms. The gun is a stodgy old classic, Smithsonian-worthy, that evokes the Made-in-USA age and also speaks of my distance, I like to think, from the cult of maximum firepower that draws harder-boiled folks to stores and gun shows to handle Bushmasters and similar weapons with death-dealing, quasi-military designs. Such ominous firearms hold no allure for me, in part because I doubt they'd do much good against a maniac carrying one or a hypothetical goon squad equipped with their vastly superior big brothers. Ban those guns. Neuter them. I'm fine with it. I can hunt with my shotguns and my deer gun (although I've grown tired of hunting), and I can protect myself from miscreants with my trusty .38.
To some in the gun-owning fraternity, this view makes me a traitor. So be it; I think they're wrong. As they have repeatedly pointed out themselves, and as even Wayne LaPierre might agree, assault rifles are functionally similar to ordinary semi-automatic rifles, differing chiefly in their sinister cosmetics, not in their underlying ballistics. This being the case, what will be lost by giving them up? Nothing but their destabilizing allure for the grandiose, image-obsessed mass killers who favor them—and whose crimes represent a far greater risk to gun rights than does the perceived hostility of certain politicians. By assenting to such a ban, the gun-owning community can demonstrate precisely the sort of reasonable public-mindedness of which some believe it to be incapable. Otherwise, the showdown will go on and we will have only ourselves to blame if our self-destructive intransigence leaves us despised and cornered, with no way out.
Ah, smell that? It's the urine-soaked bootlicking of someone who says "I've got mine! Don't come after me! I'm one of the good ones!"
And you gotta love his logic. "Sure Assault Weapons are an arbitrary classification. And banning them will do nothing, so why not cave into their demands and support such ban!"
Because remember, agreeing to a ban based on cosmetic features is the height of reasonable public-mindedness. It's totally not craven cowardice. And it's not like politicians exploiting tragedy to get absurd laws passed are a threat to gun owners.
Nope, all gun owners have to do is lie back and give the politicians everything they want.
It's funny how he can go from realizing that these laws can randomly turn people into outlaws to going "Well we might as well support stupid laws."
Oh and of a bonus. You can only comment on the article if you pay. Classy.
Update: Though Walter's not alone. The Vice president is also on the sure these proposed gun control laws won't do anything to stop mass shootings, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ban something! bandwagon.
Yeah, gun owners should totally throw in their lot with these folks!
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