Salena Zito: For many, owning a gun was taboo. Now they’re buying them.
PITTSBURGH — Outside of that one time going to target practice with some friends while he was in medical school, the first time David picked up a gun to learn how to use it — this time for protection — was five years ago, when he went to a range a few weeks after Robert Bowers walked into the Tree of Life synagogue and killed 11 people who had gathered to worship not far from David’s home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
“Handling a gun, let alone owning one, was not anything I had ever considered doing in my life,” said David, who asked that his full name not be used for fear of personal safety of himself and his family.
and,
The people in his classes aren’t just going to the range to learn how to properly handle a firearm, said Mr. Anderson, who is Jewish. They are also learning how to store one, the laws of carrying one — and how to buy one.
Mr. Anderson said it is interesting to watch the expression that crosses a mother’s or a grandmother’s or a young woman’s face when she goes from someone who has always looked at gun ownership with either hesitancy or revulsion to the realization that it empowers her. It has nothing to do with politics.
It’s similar to a moment in the movie “Shane,” he said, when the gunfighter tells a mother annoyed at him for teaching her young son to draw and shoot that the gun is not something to fear. Instead, he says it’s “a tool, like a shovel or a hammer or an axe. It’s not bad in and of itself; it’s what you do with it.”
plus this,
“You think about Democrat, Republican, and the makeup of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party — and geographically where they were — guns historically transcended lots of those lines. You could be a Southern Democrat and be a big hunter, or the Republican country club member to never pick up a gun in your life.” The shift to classic partisan divides on the topic began with the Reagan assassination attempt and have been unfolding ever since.
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