Walmart is not a supermarket. It is a department store that sells all kinds of goods, including sporting goods. Kind of like the "general store" of yesteryear that also sold guns. You can't just grab a shotgun and take it up to the counter. It's a special section of the store under lock & key.
Are you saying that it's almost like we live in different cultures? Because we do. There are many things in England that I cannot comprehend. When I lived there I had to pay for parking, wait in line, sing songs with other men on a train and eat food in a place that sold gardening supplies. All of those things are completely alien to me and uncomfortable - it doesn't make them wrong and I adapted.
If you had grown up in the USA there's a good chance your dad would have bought you a .22 rifle when he felt you were responsible enough and taught you how to shoot tin cans. And from there you would understand how to take responsibility for a weapon, learn to care for it it, learn safety, and then graduate up to other weapons until you could hunt game with your uncles just like you go fishing. I don't consider that desensitization, our culture teaches us how to handle these things like grown men... for some reason people from Europe love to talk about guns in America. We aren't sitting around in the USA talking about how bizarre it is that people in Europe are freaked out by guns.
Maybe you guys needs a little less gun control? If you spent some time at the shooting range or in a duck blind you would realize it's not the big deal it's made out to be.
Oh come on, that's not the same thing and you know it. I live in a very rural area, surrounded by farms and know many people who have guns and go shooting, and have shot many guns myself, but that's not the same thing. Obviously we have different cultures, and that's good for many reasons, but you can't compare eating food in a garden centre to being able to buy guns in a shop that sells computer games and BBQ equipment and bed linen. You are also on very shaky ground when you talk about being raised to handle guns professionally when this year a NINE YEAR OLD shot and killed a shooting instructor at a shooting range, with a feckin Uzi!
It's not an us v you situation, I was just pointing out how ingrained guns are in your society and how desensitised the American public is to guns. Your culture doesn't teach people those things at all, if it did you wouldn't have the problems with guns that you do. Your culture teaches people that it is their right to own a weapon and that right is hammered home every chance possible and often supersedes other rights.
People only like to talk about guns in America because of the continuous mass shootings that happen and because it makes so many headlines around the world on our news channels and on the internet.
Case in point, we had a shooting here in the UK in Hungerford, straight after the government banned the sale and ownership of semi and automatic rifles, a few years later Scotland (Dunblane) had a school shooing where 16 kids and a teacher were shot. The government then changed the firearm laws and banned handgun sales. Australia suffered a similar tragedy and completely changed their firearm laws and they haven't had an incident like that since. America has the events on a far too regular occurrence and then Sandy Hook happens and you hear people saying that teachers should be trained to shoot and then armed. Two reporters got shot this week and people are saying Journalists should be armed. Why? because your second amendment supersedes other rights, if it didn't it would be changed. Then you get people saying it can't be changed, yet the wording second AMMENDMENT should show you it already has been changed. Arguing that something can't be changed after it already has been changed previously, is nonsensical to many people, and plain batshit crazy to others.
The reason people talk about it is because we simply cannot understand why you won't change your gun laws despite how many people keep dying. Well, we do, because of money and the gun lobby, but we can't see why the pro gun supporters value their right to own a gun over peoples lives. How many lives have to be lost before it changes?
This isn't a tit for tat argument, and I'm not arguing from a high horse, or trying to make out Europe or the UK is better, because in many ways we are not, everyone has a lot to learn from each other and America has many attributes to teach the world, it's an amazing place for many different reasons, but your gun laws suck. They are closer to a third world countries laws than anywhere else, and many people in the Western world just don't get it, and never will. All the time you continue to allow kids and teachers to get shot at school or reporters to get shot on live TV and all the time people still defend their right to bear arms, this will continue.
You instantly went on the defensive and made it in to a Europe v US argument, or us Europeans thinking we are better than Americans discussion, when that simply is not the case. It's how a society values life, and how they protect life that is the point. And when that argument arises, I personally don't think pro gun rights supporters have a leg to stand on, and you won't all the time these incidents continue to happen. You can argue as much as you like and you can care or not care, but the plain truth of the matter is people are dying because of guns. Kids are dying at school, because of guns. Reporters on live TV are dying because of guns, and what any gun owner is essentially saying is that their perceived right to own these weapons is more important than the lives of those who continue to die.
If you can't work out why many people can't understand that, or get upset by that (including many Americans) then therein lies the crux of the problem.
It's quite simple. Anyone who defends the right to own a gun and continues to support the sale of these firearms is basically saying that they value that right over the lives of others, and that all the lives lost to guns are basically collateral damage and acceptable, because if it was unacceptable things would obviously change. The trouble is, the majority of Americans now think the same, but it's still not changing. I wonder why that is?
