The Liberal Gun Club Forum

Nearly three decades have passed since then. I’ve changed my political views a lot. Heck, I was a Republican that voted for Reagan in ’80 since it was all I knew. My parents may have been miserable but they were still an influence on me and they were, pardon the expression, die-hard Republicans. So that’s what I was. And until a few months ago I thought I was staunchly anti-gun. But that changed as well.

Despite the comment from kestrel9000 it wasn’t a single thing, an epiphany, rather it was a growing revelation that I was still afraid of the guns I had personally encountered. Willing to let that fear of them dictate my response to them, the people that have them, and explain the tragedies that occur because a gun is involved in those tragedies.

I still don’t like guns, if you come away from reading this and that point isn’t clear then I failed and I apologize. The first phase of my change was realizing that dead is dead. How and why someone dies really doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they’re dead. My father, the bastard who was willing to shoot his only son, died in November of last year. He died largely from not caring in the least about himself or anyone else but still, dead is dead. It made me think a lot about life and death. Few people want to die sooner than rather than later. Yes, there are people who choose suicide for personal reasons. Great suffering from pain physical or mental, but they choose it.