LOL.

Cops shouldn’t be allowed to carry guns. Thats funny.

JB, I don’t disagree with you on cops and the military. The reason I don’t is because I’m looking at this problem of carrying guns in public from a different angle. I expect police and military people to carry guns and, by and large, they have earned the trust of the public because of their responsible actions. But as we can see in this story, they sometimes go off the rails and kill people. That’s not a mark against all cops.

On the other hand we now have “gun toter” strolling the streets trying to “normalize” the presence of guns in places where they have no legitimate function. It’s like a lumberjack wanting to normalize an ax by taking it to a day care center. It doesn’t fit.

I’m contrasting the people we know and trust with those we DON’T know and who haven’t earned our trust (and never will). If a policeman can come unhinged, we know a gun toter can damn well do the same thing and we have no tradition of standing around waiting to see if they will or won’t. We give cops a pass and they honor that trust 99% of the time. But we don’t know gun toters and we don’t want to get to know them. Their presence screws with our sense of who can or can’t be trusted in the public square. It’s not “normal” to walk down main street with an assault weapon casually dangling over one’s shoulder. Only weirdos would do that and it places undue pressure on citizens to have the implicit message of ‘get used to it” rubbed in our noses. We’re not going get used to it. We never will. Citizens carrying guns in the public domain will never be “normalized” and therefore the toters will always be regarded as dangerous and disruptive to public order.

Like Bravo’s use of “we” I assumed the word was used collectively as a society. I often use “we as a society” in my posts. If either poster meant “we” to mean a particular segment of people, I’m sure the designation would have been qualified.
You seem to miss the point of some of “us” having reservations about toting weapons in neighborhoods and public that serves no other purpose than to incite, regardless of anyone else’s intentions. As I mentioned elsewhere, freedom–even 2nd amendment god-given rights to brandish a machine gun–has its limits, whether it’s a nazi paramilitary group marching in a Jewish neighborhood or running around nude in public. Behavior out of character and contrary to the norm is going to raise concern and suspicion anywhere.
When I visit Tombstone, there’s all cross-sections of people walking the streets with six shooters strapped to their hips. At predetermined times, they’ll even draw and shoot at each other in the street. They also wear period dress. The reenacted environment makes gun toting normal and acceptable, even though any nut could be carrying a loaded gun with real ammunition instead of blanks.
When your obsession with exact semantics gets to the point of judging words in an informal forum as “dysfunctional” and participants as “weirdos,” you portray yourself as having the handicap.

(sigh) Your convoluted logic that dismisses the public concerns–even those of NRA members–of publicized shooting sprees does indeed make you an individual apart from the mainstream.

7 spree shootings of the past year are not my opinion.

The problem is as I see it is that Groucho is convinced he is right, yet is never able to offer any fact to prove his point. He only uses his not-to-be-questioned opinion and LW talking points. Funny how that works both ways, eh.

So, lets stop all forms of sexual intercourse. People like some in here shouldn’t be breeding anyway.