After learning about the four year old boy who accidentally shot and killed his father Sackhoff tweeted, “Please practice gun safety. This is horrible!”
One of her followers responded with “Here’s a radical idea folks. How about NO gun?”
If this doesn't prove to you the challenge we face is general ignorance about guns and gun ownership, I'm not sure anything will.
We must restrain our desire to look like radical wingnuts to the average, non gun owning citizens, and make a case they can understand that is based on logic and reason and empirical evidence. Granted, they wont all be reasonable and rational in their response, but most wake up and begin to understand things in a rational manner after seeing enough of it, long enough.
We must educate the average citizen about who the responsible gun owner is, and how many of us there are. They simply don't realize their neighbor owns a gun, or 30 guns. They simply don't know the guy from the office they golf with on Fridays owns a gun. If they knew there were over 84 million of us, and that there are 3-5 incidents a week across the country of gun owners legally using firearms to protect themselves and their family, and that all the gun laws in the world wont take illegal guns off the street, they may begin to lose their fear of the responsible gun owner and lose the irrational expectation of "how about this? No guns!"
As long as we remain shut in to our little clicks, just bantering among ourselves, occasionally saying something outside our circle of back slappers about "Just try to come take my guns" or "Obama is a muslim gun grabber" or some crap like that, we'll wake up one morning to discover we are all criminals now. Either criminals or no longer gun owners.
In addition to the average, non-gun owning citizens, there is a large number of gun owners in this country that include democrats as well as republicans, athesits as well as christians, hispanics and blacks as well as whites, women as well as men (although the NRA has obviously recently gotten the word that women shoot too), gays as well as straights, city dwellers as well as rural dwellers. There is a huge, diverse group of gun owners that can unite as an extremely powerful force to protect our gun rights, if you'll reach out to them and not allow differences in things that have absolutely nothing to do with gun rights to divide you on the issue of gun ownership rights.
Or you can give up your guns. Your choice. Tolerance and inclusiveness and guns, or intolerance, exclusiveness, and no guns.
Here are some examples of the kind of comments that destroy any chance of someone changing the "anti legal gun ownership" views of average citizens who do not own guns or have much experience with firearms.
I would give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume this was meant as sarcasm, but to someone who isn't as generous and knows nothing about him, this genius is certainly going to win some hearts and minds, yes?
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