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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Guns are not a part of the culture of my homeland, except perhaps for the occasional Bollywood movie in which the bad guy meets his demise staring down the wrong end of a barrel.
My childhood in India was steeped in ahimsa, the tenet of nonviolence toward all living things.
The Indians may have succeeded in ousting the British, but we won with Gandhian-style civil disobedience, not a revolutionary war.
I grew up not knowing a single gun owner, and even today India has one of the strictest gun laws on the planet. Few Indians buy and keep firearms at home, and gun violence is nowhere near the problem it is in the United States. An American is 12 times more likely than an Indian to be killed by a firearm, according to a recent study.
It's no wonder then that every time I visit India, my friends and family want to know more about America's "love affair" with guns.
I get the same questions when I visit my brother in Canada or on my business travels to other countries, where many people remain perplexed, maybe even downright mystified, by Americans' defense of gun rights.
I admit I do not fully understand it myself, despite having become an American citizen nearly a decade ago. So when I learn the National Rifle Association is holding its annual convention here in Atlanta, right next to the CNN Center, I decide to go and find out more.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/28/world/indian-immigrant-nra-convention/index.html
(Score: 1) by a-zA-Z0-9$_.+!*'(),- on Thursday May 04 2017, @12:54PM (1 child)
a pacifist is someone who has some desire or aim not to kill. A gun can kill but it can be used for things not related to killing (i.e. target practice, sports, olympics). So the analogy to vegetarianism doesn't quit fit. It would only make sense if the NRA was devoted to killing, which I don't think it is. Even a pacifist can be a biathelete:
http://www.denverpost.com/2012/02/21/biathletes-caught-up-in-combo-of-cross-country-target-shooting/ [denverpost.com]
“I’m a pacifist and I was really opposed to guns before this, but I really enjoy the camaraderie and the atmosphere and the challenge,” said Elizabeth Pike, a 20-year club member from Boulder. “The challenge never ends. I’m in my mid-40s now, so I’m not getting any faster, but you can always work on shooting."
Oddly enough, pro-death penalty and pro-choice organizations are (definitionally) "pro-death" organizations. So a pacifist would be like a vegetarian at *those* kinds of events.
The NRA is a foolish but powerful advocacy group. It is not, afaict, a pro-death group, any more than NASCAR or the AMA (organizations whose members occasionally kill or die in the course of their profession in a way that it incidental to it, but not the main point of it). Advocating for dangerous tools (or cars or risky medical practices or incompetent doctors) doesn't make you pro-death.
https://newrepublic.com/article/114112/anonymouth-linguistic-tool-might-have-helped-jk-rowling
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:00PM
a pacifist is someone who has some desire or aim not to kill. A gun can kill but it can be used for things not related to killing ... So the analogy to vegetarianism doesn't quit fit.
I think you are taking it a bit far or reading a bit to much into it. It was meant more to signify the futility of it all, she isn't going to understand and like it. A person that has zero experience to guns, comes for a culture that as she states has no interest in guns and then to top that off works for CNN, an organization that seem to more or less constantly vilify people that most likely belong to the gun-crowd, just isn't going to get insight in a few hours. This just isn't going to go well. Sure, she might have tried but she wasn't going to change or understand after a visit.
Sending her to do the story is just another time that the liberal-media don't even try. I don't believe this was a "let's get to know them story" (them being the "enemy"). If it had been she would have had a whole different approach. That she even bothers to mention that they are all white men and they don't like people like her is just one example of that. She probably wants to paint a picture of gun-toting racist rednecks in attendance but then that backfires as from her story it seems most of them are just normal people. But the line was there to remind her CNN-readers that there are evil and vile racists in the NRA crowd and Trump-land and you can never be allowed to forget that.
If you want to get to know someone and understand then you don't start by provoking them and asking why they like to own guns that kills, as in why do you like to murder (... people that look like her). It would be like going to Comic-con and ask them if (or why) they are virgins living in their parents basement. Good luck getting something worthwhile out of them after that. That is just poor interviewing technique. Provocation is a useful tool in an interview situation but not as a first question and not if you want to understand someone or "be friends". It will most likely put them in a hostile and defensive mood and things won't progress well from there. At least that is my experience from doing interviews in an academic setting. Probably great for TV-journalism if you want to ambush someone and get a reaction of denial or anger. Not so much in any other case.
These things combined is more or less why I thought her story was bad and didn't really offer any kind of insight.