Sorry for all the scrolling. I thought it was important to do it to scale.
I just want to add, I am not at all anti-gun. My sister owns a gun, my dear departed friend Nicole owned multiple guns, I have several other friends who own guns. I have fired guns myself, and I would love to go hunting sometime if I ever get around to it. What gets my goat is the people who deny that there is a tremendous gun violence problem in the United States, or who use absolutely absurd arguments to oppose even the most modest gun law reforms. We have several times as many per capita gun deaths (including suicides, homicides, and accidents) as the next closest first-world country. No matter how you slice it, that's a problem. I don't view this as a moral/ideological issue, I view it as an epidemiological issue. We've got way more gun violence than we ought; how do we craft public policy to reduce that?
Unfortunately, a lot of the anti-gun control arguments (including people smugly joking about "backgrounds checks for pressure cookers!!1!!!1!") completely miss the fucking point. Honestly, pro-gun advocates have done more to shift my opinion in favor of gun control than anti-gun advocates. We need an adult conversation here, and unfortunately a lot of the pro-gun folks are behaving like paranoid idiot children.
