Time for a few Q/As!
Q: Are you some kind of gun nut?
A: Nope. Not very gun-savvy, I'm afraid. Don't know much about them. I mean, I know bullets come out of them and that bullets can really hurt you, kill you even if it's done right, but beyond that I don't know much. You know how in movies when the hero is trying to save some innocent person in a firefight and he somehow gets an extra gun and then asks the innocent person if he "knows how to use this," and the innocent person says something like "hell yeah, I was in Vietnam" or some such, or maybe just "uh, yeah I think so"? Well, that wouldn't be me. My answer would be something like, "Well, no, not really. Tell you what, why don't you shoot these guys and I'll just blog about it later."
Q: Aren't you scared of guns?
A: I'm generally not afraid of inanimate objects.
Q: Oh, well, you think you're cute, don't you? Guns are dangerous.
A: No. People can be dangerous. But guns are not.
Q: Right. But people with guns are dangerous.
A: Only a relative few of them. Have you ever noticed that for all the talk about our pervasive gun culture in America there are really very few gun crimes--relatively speaking anyway? Hell, reform our drug laws and you'll get rid of most of the gun crime we have now.
Q: So you would take your children to a restaurant that allows people to bring in guns?
A: Yep. No worries there. News flash: You're probably already bringing your children into places where people have guns with them; you just don't know it. Guns and gun owners are everywhere. You're just not aware of it because they're not shooting up everything the way you assume they would be.
Q: Come on, seriously. You've got two children, one six, and the other two. Who would you rather have sitting at the table next to you? Someone like Say Uncle, who could be armed, or someone like Steve Steffens, who would not.
A: Oh, heck, not even a close call. I've never met either of them, but I've read enough of their stuff to know that I would much prefer to sit next to Say Uncle. Heck, I'd even ask him to show my kids his gun (assuming he had one on him--probably a safe assumption), although there's a fair chance that my kids, who are currently on a Star Wars kick--would prefer to see a light saber. Whereas Steve Steffens would probably just drone on about rich Republicans, single-payer health care or something like that, boring my family to tears and just generally ruining our meal and that of other folks who have actual lives. And that's the purpose of this blog, to give people information about the places where the Steve Steffenses of the world will be hanging out, so that the rest of us--gun-lovers or not--can enjoy our nights out.
