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Maintained By: The Custodian

I fall somewhere in the unknown middle on gun regulation in the United States. I was raised in and live in New York City, having experienced the city in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s and from the late Oughties on. There were a lot of guns in New York when I was a kid. I don't have any idea if there are more or fewer of them there right now - but back in those days, there was a lot of gun crime. I developed the firm opinion that there were really too many people in too small a space, in New York City, not to heavily regulate the carrying of firearms, especially concealed handguns.

On the other hand, I went to summer camp, and every summer for many years I was trained to shoot and maintain a bog-standard .22 Long Rifle. I enjoyed it, quite a bit; my father (who is vituperatively anti-handgun) bought my brother and I a nice Savage-Anschütz .22 with a ring sight, and we carried it into the woods in Northern Vermont to shoot targets and plink things. We still do, occasionally.

While I appreciated guns as objects (look, I'm a geek, and they are complex mechanical engineering triumphs which manage forces, for which you can acquire endless different varieties and accessories and tools and...yeah, like I said, geek) I was firmly sure of my position that there should be heavy regulation of handguns in New York City. I really didn't have much of an opinion abut other places, since I didn't live there. Anyway, I wasn't really that interested in guns as a hobby for me, because the cities I've lived in have made it very difficult to own guns and by their very nature, places to shoot guns were pretty far away from where I resided.

Recently, though, I met a man who is passionately into guns and who passionately likes to teach others about them and who also just loves to debate.

Not argue.

We don't really argue, even. We've spent hours and hours and hours discussing our positions on gun regulation and gun use and gun ownership, and really what we're doing (we've found) is a sort of forensics - we're trying to dig down our logic chains and experiences to find out where the point is that we diverge. We're pretty sure it's something fairly small.

In the meantime, he was instrumental in helping me acquire a gun I'd always wanted for historical reasons if no other. This summer, I'm spending time near him while I also work on a Pilot's license, and he is teaching me the Ways of the gun so that I may form my opinions and positions from a basis of fact and personal knowledge and experience, rather than from anecdotes or predigested stories.

 TitlebyType
1 My Rifle (personal) The Custodian writeup
2 April 20, 2012 (log) The Custodian writeup
3 April 25, 2012 (log) The Custodian writeup
4 M1 thumb (thing) The Custodian writeup
5 April 28, 2012 (log) The Custodian writeup
6 Smith & Wesson Model 5906 (thing) The Custodian writeup
7 magazine follower (thing) The Custodian writeup
8 pistol slide (thing) The Custodian writeup
9 May 4, 2012 (log) The Custodian writeup
10 May 26, 2012 (log) The Custodian writeup
11 Winchester Model 74 (thing) The Custodian writeup
12 June 2, 2012 (log) The Custodian writeup
13 June 3, 2012 (log) The Custodian writeup
14 July 11, 2012 (log) The Custodian writeup
15 January 17, 2017 (log) The Custodian writeup