Oh , The Horror … Progressive Panties In A Wad As “Elite” College Students Take Up The Shooting Sports

Oh-Oh: Students At Elite Universities Now Taking Up Arms

 

 

 

 

 

” The Washington Post is on the case:

  In between completing problem sets, writing code, organizing hackathons, worrying about internships and building solar cars, a group of MIT students make their way to the athletic center, where they stand side-by-side, load their guns and fire away.They are majoring in biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, aeronautics, mechanical engineering, computer science and nuclear science. Before arriving at MIT, nearly all of them had never touched a gun or even seen one that wasn’t on TV.

 

“ Which is strange because I’m from Texas,” said Nick McCoy, wearing a ­T-shirt advertising his dorm and getting ready to shoot.

  How weird is that? A guy from Texas, new to shooting! Truly, the flyover heartland is a strange and wonderful place. I wonder who — or what — has corrupted this poor lad? Let’s check the headline:

 

 Gun industry’s helping hand triggers a surge in college shooting teams

Aha! Big Firearms!

  McCoy is one of the brainiacs on MIT’s pistol and rifle teams, which, like other college shooting teams, have benefited from the largesse of gun industry money and become so popular that they often turn students away. Teams are thriving at a diverse range of schools: Yale, Harvard, the University of Maryland, George ­Mason University, and even smaller schools such as Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania and Connors State College in Oklahoma.

“ We literally have way more students interested than we can handle,” said Steve Goldstein, one of MIT’s pistol coaches.

  The horror, the horror. I hate to break the news to Michael S. Rosenwald, but when I was in high school in Hawaii, we had a rifle team and mandatory Junior ROTC, as did many high schools across America back when it was a country of men instead of women and metrosexuals. But perhaps real men are making a comeback:

  Although some collegiate teams date to the late 1800s, coaches and team captains say there is a surge of new interest from students, both male and female, ­finally away from their parents and curious to handle one of the country’s most divisive symbols. Once they fire a gun, students say they find shooting relaxing — at MIT, students call it “very Zen” — and that it teaches focusing skills that help in class.

  Some also find their perceptions about guns changing. “I had a poor view, a more negative view of people who like guns than I do now,” said Hope Lutwak, a freshman on MIT’s pistol team. “I didn’t understand why people enjoyed it. I just thought it was very violent.”

  Anyone who’s ever shot knows that Zen is precisely the word we shooters use. Everything is focused on the target; in my experience, nothing clears the mind like successfully putting a few hundred rounds exactly where you want them to go. Nothing “violent” about it. But that darn gun industry…

  And that’s precisely what the gun industry hoped it would hear after spending the past few years pouring millions of dollars into collegiate shooting, targeting young adults just as they try out new activities and personal identities.

  Okay, Rosenwald, you got us. What Big Firearms is doing is akin to what Big Tobacco did, “targeting young adults just as they try out new activities and personal identities.” It wouldn’t be a Washington Post story without some pseudo-Freudian, au courant references to “personal identities,” now, would it?

  The rest of the story goes on in this vein, full of wonderment that otherwise sensible top-tier college students have been seduced by the Cult of the Gun. If there was ever a story that spoke to the division of the cultural weaklings in the media and the rest of us, this is it.

  Some students plan to continue shooting after they graduate, but others say it will depend on family situations and how tough regulations are wherever they wind up. And they acknowledge that many in society don’t think about firearms the way they now do — that it’s less about the gun, as one student put it, and more about who is using it.

  Amazing what a little actual experience will do for you.

  Be sure to read the comments at the link. There really are Two Americas, only one of which can shoot.”

 

Thanks to Michael Walsh and The Tatler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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One Liberal European Reporter Discovers What Millions Of Americans Already Know: Shooting Is Fun

Shooting Guns? It’s Rather Fun, Actually

 

 

 

 

” Shooting a handgun at a target is a thrill; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You load bullets into a clip, push it up into the gun, turn off the safety catch, take careful hold of the gun with two hands, aim and shoot. The thing jumps in your hand and you see the bullet knock a hole in the target and spark off the floor at the back of the range. There is an extraordinary rush and then you do it again. Another spark; perhaps this time the hole in the target is a little closer to the centre. Soon you have fired the whole clip and you’re loading the deadly weapon in your hand again.

  That is just to preface a more obvious point. To a liberal European reporter, from afar, American gun culture appears utterly insane. Americans are far more likely to murder someone or to kill themselves than people in almost all Western European countries, largely because guns make it easier. That almost 33,000 people are killed with firearms each year in America (including three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earlier this week) is a colossal and largely unnecessary waste of life. That people celebrate these deadly devices and carry them around while shopping, picking up their children from school or working, seems monstrous.

  Yet shooting is fun. And what Europeans—and liberal Americans—often don’t realise is that these deadly weapons are also an accessible, affordable and interesting hobby for millions of people. My experience of firing a pistol took place at a shooting range in the Maryland suburbs, about half an hour’s drive outside of Washington, DC. I had until then never visited a shooting range and I had no idea of what to expect. But the experience was actually oddly familiar. This place was not a temple to violence. Rather, it mostly closely resembled the golf driving range that my father would occasionally take me to as a child.”

 

 

Then there is this:

 

 

” In the range people fired guns gleefully at targets. Some were white, male, middle-aged and somewhat scary-looking. But not all. Across from where I fired my pistol, two black women, one with a small son, were taking turns (the child heavily supervised). Shooting targets was a fine family day out. At a practice target outside of the range, plenty of people were learning how to hold a weapon for the first time, without pointing it at anyone, dropping it or injuring themselves as it recoiled. Again, it resembled a driving range: people hitting targets for fun.

  And the truth is that in the range, the violence that guns inflict on America felt extremely remote. A few stickers here and there made political points (“My right to own a gun is what protects your right to tell me I can’t”, said one). But mostly, the idea of guns as a means to kill somebody was absent. And so it is for most people who fire guns. The most dangerous neighborhoods for gun violence in America are in poor cities, not in the suburban areas where most gun owners live. Most of the 21,000 or so suicides in which guns are used take place behind closed doors. And the numbers, while devastatingly high, are not so high that most Americans will know someone who was killed with a gun.

  For the majority of gun owners, being told that their harmless hobby is somehow responsible for the deaths of other people must be deeply unpleasant. Worse still is when they are told it by metropolitan types with more money than them. Michael Bloomberg, for example, New York’s billionaire ex-mayor. Or possibly me. And it makes me wonder whether one of the problems—certainly not the main problem, but one of them—with attempts to control guns is precisely that the people making the loudest case for reform are people like Mr Bloomberg and me.”

 

 

 There is some confusion sown by the writer with the two separate fatality statistics wherein the ill-informed reader could easily be lead to believe ( intentionally?) that the linked 21,000 suicide deaths are in addition to and not a part of the total firearms related deaths but the typical gun owner knows better . 

  And while the writer does take the obligatory shots at demonizing that leftist bogeyman , the NRA , overall the article from a self-declared liberal with no firearms experience and plenty of pre-conceived anti-gun bias is fairly evenhanded .

 

 

” But keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill is not incompatible with widespread gun ownership. And bringing about the changes that will make America safer means convincing people who routinely use guns safely that they are not the enemy. Perhaps what gun control needs is a few advocates who are a little more visibly familiar with the sheer fun of holding a pistol and pulling the trigger.”

 

 

   Perhaps unsurprisingly the author chooses to remain anonymous , writing under the byline DK . Still , the article is worth your time . Read it all at The Economist .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Man Of The Left Who Is Also A “Gun Guy”

What Liberals Need to Understand About ‘Gun Guys’*

 

 

 

” Dan Baum is not your typical gun guy. He has a lifelong love of firearms he can trace back to the age of five. But he’s also a Jewish Democrat and a former staff writer for The New Yorker and feels like a misfit next to most gun owners, who identify overwhelmingly on the conservative side of the spectrum.

In order to bridge this gap, Baum set off on a cross-country journey, chatting with everyone from a gun store owner in Louisville to a wild boar hunter in Texas to a Hollywood armorer. The result is Gun Guys: A Road Trip. I spoke with Baum about his trek through gun country and why this issue is one of our nation’s most complicated and politically divisive.

You write that you didn’t want to be part of a gun culture, even though you were a “gun guy” yourself. Why did you feel this conflict?

This is one of the things I was trying to figure out — why a fondness for firearms, these beautiful mechanical devices that are so fun to shoot, always seems to be found on the same chromosome as political conservatism. I’m not a conservative. At the same time, often I’d be around my “tribe” — the liberals — and they’d say these terrible things about gun people. “Gun nut,” “penis envy,” all this stuff. I’d keep my mouth shut. I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with either group. That’s why I always wanted to do this book.

How did the act of carrying a weapon every day affect you?

There’s a part of every gun guy that wants to carry a gun because you get to be with your gun all the time. I know that sounds weird, but not if you like guns, you like handling them. Most of the time you don’t get to. You take them out of the safe once or twice a year.”

 

 

 

*And ‘Gun Girls’ we would add …

 

 

 

HT/Instapundit

 

 

 

 

Related articles

• A Liberal With a Gun (outsideonline.com)
• ‘Gun Guys,’ by Dan Baum (sfgate.com)
• Why Liberals Should Support Armed Self-Defense (bloomberg.com)
• Gun Nuts (tcburnett.wordpress.com)
• ‘Gun Guy’ takes a shot at playing mediator (knoxnews.com)
• What do ‘gun guys’ really think? Author Dan Baum shares what he’s learned (startingpoint.blogs.cnn.com)

 

 

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I Blame The Microphone

SE Cupp on The Bob Costas Idiocy

 

 

 

 

 

Blame The Men, Not The Guns

” But in the case of Jovan Belcher, the Kansas City Chiefs player who shot his girlfriend and then killed himself, it’s all too easy to ignore the bigger story of domestic violence and train everyone’s attention on the gun instead.

Costas quoted Jason Whitlock, a sports writer who once compared the NRA to the Ku Klux Klan, blaming “gun culture” for Perkins’ death:

“Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.”

Ascribing human capabilities to an inanimate object — endowing handguns with the ability to “tempt us” into murder — takes silly to new lows. Amateur psychiatrists, and maybe even some children, would tell you that if someone is tempted by an object to harm someone else, that person’s probably got very serious mental problems.

The grossly irresponsible aspect of Costas’ screed against guns is that in one fell swoop, he gave us all permission to blame the weapon instead of the perpetrator.

Ironically, it’s the same kind of excuse that abusers use and too many abuse victims ultimately believe: that it isn’t the abuser’s fault. They blame alcohol, the way a woman dresses, an unkempt house, a late night out. “

Related articles

• Columnist says Second Amendment to blame for Javon Belcher’s murder/suicide (al.com)
• Black Sports Columnist Jason Whitlock: NRA Is New KKK (patdollard.com)
• Bob Costas says he expected grief over gun remarks (stltoday.com)
• Bob Costas hijacks Sunday Night Football to give anti-gun lecture (twitchy.com)
• Bob Costas Now Calls His Gun Comments a ‘Mistake’ (pjmedia.com)
• Poll: Was Costas wrong to push for gun control on NFL broadcast? (kdvr.com)

THE GREATEST GUN EVER

Ted Nugent : 

 

 ” I have achieved the ultimate gun nut American dream by being trained by the greatest snipers the world has ever known,  being one of the lucky few to get so much trigger time with the heroes of the US Military and law enforcement. I have spent my life studying guns, admiring guns, shooting guns, fondling guns, cleaning guns, buying guns, wearing out guns, going to gun shows, writing about guns, promoting gun ownership, giving guns as gifts, and teaching others about guns.  I’m the gun guy, a loud guitar Dirty Harry with a ponytail. “

 

 

 

” What I’m rarely asked is what I believe to be the most important gun. Without question, the Red Ryder BB gun is the most important gun in the history of American weaponry.  I suspect more American shooters have begun their shooting lifestyle with a Red Ryder than any other gun.  Tens of millions of Red Ryders have probably been sold, making it the most popular gun in American history. “

 

Related articles

• Uh-Oh: Ted Nugent Represents Gun Owners on Discovery Channel (thetruthaboutguns.com)
• Family Outdoor Fun & Gun Safety with Daisy BB Guns #CBias (moreismerrier.com)
• Richmond gun show attracted thousands of registered gun owners (wtvr.com)
• Lil’ Red Ryder (legosandtutus.wordpress.com)