[benjohnson]

Locally, I live in a very diverse area, and the typical customer has skewed much less 'good-old-boy' in the last two years.

The 'good-old-boys' are generally very happy with this and love to see new people of all backgrounds take the first steps toward citizen ownership of firearms. While there may be other disagreements on a political level, those barriers seem to be forgotten when people of good will help each-other out.

[salawat]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled at the spike. The part that bugs me is that The more I look at Federal regulation as written, and the types of conclusions people are capable of apparently reaching from collected datasets, I'm not entirely convinced that there isn't actually some on the down-low malicious compliance tracking being enabled via outsourcing, even if you lose track of things after the first purchase.

I don't like messy ineffectual laws on the books.

Which is why I try not to dig too much. The more you know, the more it grates. A LexisNexus subscription is involved somewhere, I'm sure.

[uniqueid]

  I'm thrilled at the spike.

That reaction is completely alien to me. There's probably more to it than "More people who aren't me have lethal weapons... fantastic!" but on a surface level, it's hard to relate to.

[nathanaldensr]

The fact guns are lethal is a feature, not a bug. Gun owners recognize how evil mankind can be. They are often students of history--all the dictators over the course of time who themselves used the power of government enforced by those happy to subjugate others. Much of the youth today have never lived in an actual warzone or seen dictators rise to power and actually subjugate people. These youths want to believe that everyone is inherently good and to be trusted; this perspective is incredibly naive as a cursory examination of history will tell us.

Yes, there are those who would use your physical vulnerability against you to control you, subjugate you, and even kill you. If and when that happens, you will realize your error. Many people are trying to prevent that future from happening in the first place by being armed to fight back.

[handrous]

Students of history? Private arms are sometimes among the tools that help dictators and other authoritarian governments come to power. I'm not aware of them as a major factor in preventing the same, with any kind of regularity (actually, I'd be interested in examples of that—at best, I'm aware of them as a probably-not-necessary secondary factor, way after things like foreign intervention or acquiring the support of a significant fraction of the military, either of which comes with its own risks, of course). I'd be surprised if increasing the rate of private arms ownerships is, per se, an improvement for a state's likelihood to become run by a dictator or other authoritarian government.

Opposing private arms ownerships doesn't necessarily equate to aiding (even accidentally) some hypothetical, future authoritarian state. It's very much not clear to me that the two are strongly connected at all, nor, if they are, that the causality runs the way proponents of the 2nd amendment as a check on authoritarian or otherwise unaccountable government assume it does.

[salawat]

>More people who aren't me have lethal weapons... fantastic!"

Nope. That's about the gist of it. I hate power asymmetry. Just like I hate info asymmetry, education asymmetry, etc...

More people armed and looking out for themselves means more people coming to terms with how unfriendly the world can be when we can't take things on trust.

Looking at and contemplating a firearm, and that you may need to use it someday, making the decision to end someone else's life to save your own is one of those experiences that more than anything else in my life taught me the value of the society I was raised in, people I could trust, and the fragility of the entire thing.

You never know what you have until it isn't there, and a firearm, amongst other utility, is a stark reminder of our duty as individuals to protect, maintain, and propagate our own version of civilization. This means we have to file off the edges of ourselves and our desires for the State we live in, and accept that there are some things we shouldn't ask anyone or anything else to do for us.

I've looked into the anthropology texts, and seen the differences in pain, suffering, corruption, and abuse of power that occur based on whether a civilization structures itself around a Guardian caste, or disseminates responsibility for self preservation amongst the group as a whole. Long story short: privileged Guardian classes lead to cyclic strife as the lessons and corruptions created by the power asymmetry create a need for a reset.

I don't pretend to know all the answers, but I know weapon ownership and the contemplation of a whole new dimension of responsibility made me a better person. I can only hope it does the same for others.

[albroland]

Sam Harris summarized a fairly pragmatic view of the necessity of firearms which might explain to you why more ownership by citizens can be viewed as a positive (2013): https://samharris.org/the-riddle-of-the-gun/