because saving the earth is a warm fuzzy kind of thing. Suburban housewives, school children, grandpas in nursing homes...everyone can feel good about saving the earth.

Guns are another thing. Guns are tools designed to kill. It's hard to get people to be warm and fuzzy about your right to own tools that kill.

<<There are two things that need to happen. First, like boychaos suggests, all taxpaying gunowners need to move to a friendlier environment. >>

Move on up to Seattle. Loads of moderate gun nerds up here!

<<Icing on the cake would be a sea of letters to major media outlets every time a violent crime takes place in shich the victim could have averted injury if he had been armed.

Remember, an anti-gun attitude is also anti=logical, and therefore anti-intellectual. Gun banners are the modern day luddites.>>

Exactly!

I love the 2nd ammendment for many reasons. Namely, the balance of equity that it's essence provides for.

If pro-gun folks collectively group together geographically to protect their own rights, they open doors for anti-gun folk to prohibit guns, and for them defeat the 2nd ammendment in said "anti-gun" provinces. Even if the prohibition doesn't apply to you because you moved to another province, the rule of this important ammendment has been stiffled- and that is problematic.

Personally, I don't endorse the NRA... in no way, because of their policymaking with regards to guns. Simply, they offer major support to individuals in politics whom for a myriad of unrelated reasons, I don't support, so thusly, I can't stand behind them. Secondly, while I appreciate their strong-arm approach to lobbying, the strong-arm approach faills miserably in education and outreach to folks on the anti-gun fence.

Society has changed enormously in the last quarter of a century, and I think that for many folks unexposed to positive gun ideologies, it's reasonable to take a luddite approach to want to ban a technology that seems to exist for no other reason than for bored kids to mistakenly kill one another. While all of us find immense frustration in that perspective, responding to it with strong-arm aggressive tactics only heightens the division, and lessens opportunities to widen a support base through education and outreach efforts.

To many, the NRA is wholly un-PC... partially for the whole redneck-impression freaking-out metropolitan urbanites, and partially because it's so alligned with one of two political parties that folks today either clearly do or don't support. Wether I or anyone in this forum thinks that's acceptable or frivolous, it is a divisive reality, and one that detracts from solving the quandry at hand.

Within San Francisco, I don't doubt that the NRA would blast the un-constitutionality of said law, and succeed. I suppose for me, the question isn't wether or not the law would pass, but rather that it would recieve such support- and that few challenges of public outreach would be made to persuasively generate dialogue and supportive education.

On the steps of capital buildings, I like the NRA. As a forum to educate and mediate concerns from both sides of the fence, to persuasively garner public support for the issue, I do think that unfortuantelly, the NRA is not adequate- and that perhaps on this issue, the two needs simply can't be met by one organization.

A bit of a mouthfull... but a big weight on my mind, of late. I do love however, that despite all the sucky ideological division in the US, that this seems to be one of the few forums that draws such immense support and unification, from every side of all fences.

K, now I wanna go blow some shit up... but I'm stuck at home, sanding. Waaah!