The new anti-gun-control meme: The US should be more like Switzerland.

[Eleanors38]

10. "Gun Culture:" A patchwork of sociological & psychological terms meant to disparage...

...more than to explain. But the use of the term does serve to illustrate how gun prohibition, like most prohibitions, gravitates to the swampy miasma of societies gone wild and wooly. All 90,000,000 of us. There is also the implied (and refreshing) concession by the controllers that guns are truly not the problem.

A better approach to the question of violence is to drop the "gun" from "gun violence," and to look at what causes violence and dysfunction in our society. I don't think the regulatory/ban approach does much at all to address deeper problems of poverty, crumbling schools and families (without those institutions, who or what is left to inculturate new generations?) This is what progressive politics are supposed to deal with.

We all have our bogies in a culture war. Most controllers are comfortable pointing to a miniscule group of yee-HAHs parading with rifles, or the rare bug-brain who shoots up a school. Inevitably, these guys are white, extremist and often nutso; the all-purpose PC enemy we can point to in public, even as thousands of homicides are ground out daily by veteran criminals who are too often black citizens in concentrated metropolitan areas. One commits a disproportionate amount of meyhem; the other is the fall guy on a puppet string. We cannot continue this charade of perceptions. In fact, most all the races and peoples in this society are law-abiding and want to be left alone by the police and the thugs. But a central reality is ANY community can be shaken down, punked, intimidated, and cowed by a small group of thugs who choose to violently impose their set of "values" on the rest. As long as this goes on, the majority of citizens should not be denied the right of self-defense. For another reality is that the police Cannot do this for us. The communities must do this themselves.