Comments on: It's Your Gun Culture: The Autostraddle Roundtable

By: Some more Switzerland

Some more Switzerland — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 18:07:03 +0000

Everyone who is serving in the military has to pass a obligatory shooting exercise once a year.
This takes place on military shooting ranges. The munition is handed out there, but since everyone has its own personal rifle the soldiers are responsible to bring them and therefore still have them at home.
(They have a personal one because they really know their weapon and couldn’t handle another one of the exact same type as well as they can handle their own!? This is not making sense to anyone apart from our right wing politicians)

However there is a lot of critism to this obligatory shooting and the rifles at home. We ARE trying to change this and to get the rifles out of our homes but swiss politics work veeery slow!
Handing in the munition was the first step towards getting rid of all the rifles in our homes. (This happened in 2007)
And in 2012 we even voted on handing in all the rifles but this didn’t pass. The law now is that you can hand your rifle back in if you want to, but you have to get it back every year for the shooting exercise so no one really does this…

By: Bhan

Bhan — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 20:25:22 +0000

Why do they have to take their guns home when they aren’t bringing ammo?

By: Bhan

Bhan — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 20:13:11 +0000

There are legitimate reasons for farmers to own shotguns I think, but that’s pretty much the only exemption I can think of.

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 08:24:12 +0000

thanks for this perspective. it gave me a lot to think about that honestly had never occurred to me before. seriously, i appreciate your input.

By: nicolegertrude

nicolegertrude — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 06:43:00 +0000

As someone who grew up in New Zealand, gun culture was not something I ever took notice of, or really cared. Sure there was occasional mentions of hunting accidents, or a murder, but… occasional. Police only have guns in locked boxes in their cars, and have only had access to tazers for a few years.

Anyways, on my first OE, I went to the US. About a week in I was on an escalator with two cops in Seattle. I was about two steps behind them? And halfway down I suddenly realised they’d have guns. I could see them. I was close enough to touch them.

So, as any person aiming to make a fool of herself would. I proceeded to have a panic attack stuck on a moving staircase in a busy mall.

By: Devin

Devin — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 16:28:34 +0000

My parents both grew up in NYC. I was born in Brooklyn, but moved to a very secluded rural area in PA when I was 3 because my mom feared violence (especially in public schools). My sister and I were raised without guns and violent television programming. We weren’t even allowed to watch Powerangers. We weren’t allowed to wrestle, play with sticks, or own toy guns. I remember having a water gun once, but it was shaped like a dolphin and its squirt range was wimpy.

After I graduated high school, a couple of guy friends took me shooting. I actually really liked it even though the kick on the 38 special made me nervous. I turned out to be a pretty decent natural shot and kept all my bullet shells. I now live in Missouri, where gun ownership and hunting are popular. My roomate’s boyfriend owns guns and I try to ignore that they are in our house (I keep hearing my mom’s incessant nagging about how most people killed by guns are killed by their own guns within their own home).

I don’t think I will ever own a gun, but sometimes I do think about getting my carrier’s permit. It just seems to be a passing thought though, like wanting to go skydiving. I know I don’t want guns in my household, but I don’t think them unnecessary. I love eating meat but am adverse to factory farming. I recognize the benefits regulated hunting has for our environment, but I don’t know if I have it in me to kill living creatures. I guess this means my views on guns are conflicting. They’re okay for hunting, but not much else. I honestly feel like each person should have to undergo some sort of psychological testing before they can purchase a gun. And I think all weapons should be registered.

By: GapersBlock

GapersBlock — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 04:59:52 +0000

I am an American. My father is an accomplished sport shooter, although strangely, he absolutely loathes hunting. (He went hunting one time in his life, shot a pheasant and has felt guilty about it ever since.) I spent a lot of my youth target shooting and skeet shooting with single-action revolvers, air guns, rifles and small shotguns, but even though I was used to firearms and I viewed shooting as a sport (I was convinced I would become an Olympic biathlete when I was a kid), I was always a little scared around them. My father was obsessive about gun safety, so that probably had something to do with it, but I also remember being very aware of the power of firearms and even BB guns.
I believe gun culture in the U.S. has shifted dramatically over the past 20 years or so. When I was a kid, my dad and I shot at a range that forbade people from shooting at targets that even slightly resembled humans. Even those vague police- and military-style outlines of the head and shoulders of a man weren’t allowed. That rule was in place because it was considered garish and irresponsible for a sportsman or sportswoman to even pretend to shoot at a person. Guns weren’t toys, even if they were used in sport and recreation, and people who viewed them as such were usually ostracized. But today, I hear it’s common for shooters to take aim at targets that explode on impact, or that are made to resemble not just human beings, but specific people — Osama bin Laden, for instance. Gun manufacturers’ marketing has followed suit. Today, even small-caliber handguns are made to look like something Rambo would carry, and I see ads that celebrate the “manliness” of cheap semiautomatic rifles, as if buying an ugly piece of garbage that won’t shoot straight but will scare off the neighbors while you stand on your lawn drunk is a sign of masculinity.
I haven’t shot a gun in more than a decade, and I probably won’t ever again. It’s too bad, because it’s a hobby I enjoy, but it’s been co-opted by lunatics, extremists and men with very low self-esteem.

By: Middling

Middling — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 22:10:58 +0000

also, I never ever made the connection between actual guns and water guns, but maybe that’s the privilige of living in a country where guns aren’t really a thing

(PS and before I start sounding seriously paranoid, it’s the idea that kitchen knives could be fallen onto when they’re left pointing out on worksurfaces that scares me – thankfully my world isn’t populated by people who’d start wielding them)

By: Middling

Middling — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 22:06:19 +0000

Jesus, so I’m one of the UK bunch and the general consensus is even that carrying a knife around in attempted self-defence is a seriously bad idea, something that can easily escalate into fatality, something that’s likely to be used against you.

Frankly the potential of kitchen knives left carelessly around frightens me. I can’t understand how people could possibly argue the way I’ve seen so many Americans try to justify having guns.

By: Willis

Willis — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 10:09:38 +0000

I was raised in South Carolina by parents who didn’t let us have any gun toys, not even water guns. However, my freshman year of high school I took a gym class that included hunter education. At a public high school. Because South Carolina. The kicker is, once we had earned our hunting licenses a woman from the Department of National Resources came to our school with shotguns and we shot skeets. On campus. With real shotguns. I loved it but in retrospect that wasn’t an okay thing to happen. This was probably a year after Columbine so I’m not sure how it even happened.

By: shannon

shannon — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 06:53:12 +0000

the only time I’ve shot a gun was at bible camp

By: Rose

Rose — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 20:11:38 +0000

I have to say, I don’t know if this is the right place to share this thought but I’m sick of hearing about the precious precious rights of people who want to own assault weapons being so important when the NRA and similar groups want to take away the rights of anti-gun teachers to teach. Literally – when one of their advocates was asked, in response to their “arm teachers” situation, what to do if a teacher doesn’t want to own a gun, they said “Well then they shouldn’t be a teacher.”

Sorry, but your right to not get fired for your beliefs is more important than your right to own a deadly weapon that has no purpose other than killing people.