Respect

One of the reasons I like John Scalzi, our numerous differences notwithstanding:

Incidentally, this is one of those places where my thinking has changed over the years. Back in my college years and early 20s I was pretty anti-gun and wouldn’t have minded a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw them. In time I realized I didn’t trust the government all that much, and certainly the last six years have solidified that idea pretty damn well. I still don’t like guns, and I still don’t buy into the various shibboleths like “an armed society is a polite society.” I don’t think an armed society is a polite society; I think an armed society is just as rude and obnoxious as any other, and the only difference is that your more crazed members of it will shoot at you rather than, say, beat you to death with a lead pipe or kick you in the kidneys until you’re pissing blood. But I recognize now that my personal dislike of firearms does not rise to the level of Constitutional revision.

It’s not that he agrees with me, it’s that he’s open-minded enough to consider the actual issue instead remaining stuck on how he feels about the issue. The understanding that the personal is not, in fact, the political is a major step forward in anyone’s intellectual maturing. Unfortunately, the majority of adults today never seem to quite reach that point.

Of course, the fact that the Founding Fathers, a group of men engaged in violent armed rebellion against their legal government, would have wanted only the government’s soldiers and policemen to be legally armed is so deeply and willfully stupid that it still boggles my mind that anyone brain-dead enough to make that argument can remain conscious long enough to articulate it.