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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:50PM
"Why do you want to own an object that can kill another human being?"
Well, why do people want to own cars? McDonalds hamburgers? Power tools? Knives (including kitchen knives?) Oh - the responses are varied and unique and won't get a true representation short of a book.
The number of times hunting is mentioned in her article? Zero. So she hasn't scratched the surface.
Has she been shooting? She "tries to understand" the fascination, but my guess is hasn't actually been on a firing line seeing what shooters actually experience.
Actually, she makes the case for American uniqueness pretty well - part of why it is the USA really is different from any other nation on Earth, and maybe why it is the superpower of the world. Lending credence to all the "bullshit" you learned about why America is special. Maybe it is.
And finally, she completely missed on a real simple notion: Most American gun owners ARE NOT MEMBERS OF THE NRA AND DON'T WANT TO BE. Because the NRA is a money grubbing organization that spends every nickel of your membership dues in postage sending you MORE requests to send them money. Because the NRA proclaims King Donald the Guardian of Guns and Obama and Clinton the nasty nastiest meanies who will grab your guns if you elect them or any other Democrat. (Yes, Virginia there are Democrat and Independent gun owners. Maybe the NRA just doesn't want to have to work or to be in dialog with the politicians to truly explain why the 2nd is in fact important.) And because the NRA are small and narrow minded and will never ONCE concede that there does in fact need to be some level of regulations in the U.S. / won't even acknowledge that the conversation should be taking place.