Rapier09 wrote:Do you own firearms friendly?
Dude, I don't even own a car or a cell phone, why the fuck would I spend my money on a gun? An RT ticket to Europe or a chunk of metal I'll never use except at the shooting range? Please.
But I do know tons of people with a bunch of money to blow on toys, and most of them are liberals, or at least social liberals. They're all big Obama voters, they're all NRA members, many of them served in the military. It's totally normal, a lot of liberals like guns. Especially gay men, I think it's sort of a way to claim their masculinity in a society that thinks gays are automatically effeminate. A lot of men who stayed closeted for a long time turned to guns and Christianity as talismans to keep the gayness away, and when they finally come out, they still love guns. And, since Republicans don't want gay people to have civil rights, they usually vote Democrat even if they believe in fiscal conservativism, pro-business, anti-health care conservative things.
Funny story. So, my friend, who has been married for four years and in a relationship with the same guy for ten years, finally came out to his parents. We all did Thanksgiving together, and the guy's father was visibly nervous. He's also a hunter and an antique gun collector. Now, this is in Atlanta, where owning guns is sort of a status thing, particularly in the gay community where there's pressure to still be a "good 'ol boy" despite living in the city and wearing a suit to work every day. It's not like these guys just own a sidearm for protection and a couple of hunting guns - they have gun lockers the size of refrigerators filled with thousands of dollars worth of automatic weapons, collector's items, guns they'll never ever use. [Insert penis-metaphor jokes here.]
So the main gun-loving guy who lived at the house where we were having Thanksgiving starts pulling out guns to show the dad. And pretty soon, you had all these gay guys (plus a lesbian who served two tours in Iraq) talking about guns, and even though I was bored to tears, it was so awesome! The dad was engaged in a conversation he knew lots about, the mom was relieved, the son and his husband could relax, and it was the bestest Turkey Day evar.
That's why Obama ran his presidential campaign, in part, on protecting the right to bear arms - he knew he needed to keep liberal, gun-owning voters on his team. Whenever that mass murder happened in Arizona, he even gave a speech reaffirming to all of us liberals that he would *not* blame guns, he specifically said that it was good to have a debate about it, but he wasn't stupid enough to think there was a single cause for that Loughner kid losing his shit. That wasn't for the Republicans - they won't vote for him anyway. That was for people like my friends, who mainly vote Democrat because the Republicans are racist/sexist/homophobic, but agree with conservatives on everything else, and are sort of afraid the Dems will try to take away their guns. Obama needs those people, because the upcoming elections are going to be close.