What he said
The reporter, Alan Feuer, makes this point about the oddity and irony of it all: “There is much to learn from the league about the failure of assumptions. While one might assume, for instance, that the city’s reputation for tolerance extends to all manner of behavior, it apparently does not extend to a love of guns.”
That phenomenon isn’t unique to New York City. If you want to taste intolerance, let it be known you own guns, and you like them.
I can’t help but notice the worried looks and whispers of waiting passengers while helping a ticket agent check in my rifle or muzzleloader at the airport.
In one case, my daughters overheard a woman tell her husband, “You’d think with children in his house he wouldn’t keep guns around.”
Amazing. I would have thought she would have been more impressed that my three daughters — then fairly young — had stood in line for 30 minutes without irritating the spit out of everyone within hearing. At some point, you would hope those judgmental sorts would look at your family group, consider the evidence before them, and realize gun ownership isn’t an indicator of criminal intent or aberrant behavior.
Then again, I doubt they put much thought into it. There’s something smug and unyielding about anti-gun bigotry that’s as stalwart as the most militant pro-gun dogma. They don’t see the irony that their otherwise tolerant views don’t extend beyond the predictable venues of race, religion or sexual preference.
The name of the article is If you try shooting a gun, you might enjoy it. And indeed most folks do. In my life, I have taken at least a dozen people shooting for their first time. Everyone of them enjoyed it and most of them bought guns shortly thereafter.
