Silver Supporter
- Messages
- 6,072
- Reactions
- 15,023
From a friend on Facebook:
Let's say from a young age, you were brought up to respect and enjoy recreational sewing machine use. It's a versatile tool, you find your niche of sewing that you enjoy (there are many) and it's something you do all the time. You sew with your family and friends. You collect sewing machines that you like because one has a special feature, another can do something the others can't, etc.
Unfortunately there is a whole group of people who don't believe civilians should have access to sewing machines at all, and that it should be left to "the professional tailors and seamstresses only" and that despite it being mentioned as a Constitutional right in your country, some want to tear that right down. Why? Because some some ne'erdowells use the sewing machine needle to hurt other people in robberies and car jackings, people who stole the sewing machine from a legitimate owner in the first place or bought it on the black sewing machine market. The anti-sewing-machine government really wants to take them away, but since it's a constitutional right they have to do this in steps. First they want to clamp down on what kind of sewing machines you can buy, then they want to restrict how many sewing needles they allow your machine to have. Certain sewing machine needles aren't "environmentally friendly" because environmentalists are worried about the needles contaminating areas even though no evidence supports their claims, but the the gov't has banned certain sewing machine needles because of it. Certain "features" make a sewing machine an "assault sewing machine" that are arbitrarily picked because they look "scary" by ignorant politicians that only know about sewing machines from ridiculous, non-realistic use in movies. The government doesn't care when studies show that their clamping down doesn't work at all, because they don't really care about public safety, they just want sewing machines out of the hands of civilians. Many celebrities get involved, and it's always the ignorant ones that advocate sewing machine removal because "if there weren't any sewing machines on the streets, they couldn't be used for violence" all the while ignoring that when other countries have successfully eliminated civilian sewing machine ownership, the violence just shifts to another tool that can be used as a weapon (this, in real life, is noticeable in the UK, Mexico, and Japan amongst other countries).
Basically you're in a constant struggle and battle to keep the sewing machines that are rightfully yours. Every time some idiot brings violence to a school campus or to a political leader, the whole uproar happens all over again with anti-sewing machine advocacy groups trying to use the tragedy to simply push their legislation forward. You may not be a staunch conservative but they're the only ones who care about sewing machine support so you join the National Sewing Machine Association because they're the biggest lobbying group for civilian sewing machine use, but it's full of crazy conservatives that you don't want anything to do with. You basically look back at the old, simpler days and wish you could have lived during the time when sewing machines weren't so vilified and you could just go out and have some fun.
Now, what's the moral of my story? I'm a reasonably serious marksman, I don't compete but shooting is one of my most important pastimes. I collect firearms both for the historical aspect and also because I like to collect things that I'm interested in, be it vacuum tube amplifiers or books. Firearms, to me, are tools. They are wonderful fun at the target range and useful for hunting. They're ingrained in my upbringing as something fun to look forward to, something to respect; I grew up in a reasonably rural area, I've gone hunting several times and enjoy deer and feral hog hunting. The problem is that firearms can be used for evil, and because of that people who don't understand them and watch movies get scared and want them taken away so that they can't be used for evil anymore. It is a horrible tragedy every time some idiot decides to commit an act of violence on a school campus or against a member of the government, but eliminating firearms won't change that there are evil, screwed up, mentally deranged people out there that decide to commit acts of evil, and it's reprehensible that as soon as a tragedy strikes the anti-gun advocates are swept up in a fury to try to use the event to pass their anti-gun laws with no respect for the tragedy itself. And it doesn't change that there are screwed up people in this world. They refuse to address the societal problem of evil itself, so in countries where firearms are severely restricted or eliminated you see a spike of knife-related violence because that's the next thing to go to. So then knife legislation is introduced to eliminate that, but it's just a recursive cycle. Governments want to ban certain calibers, restrict magazine capacity, eliminate certain "evil" features like pistol grips on rifles so it doesn't look like an M16 or AK47 therefore making it "safer", ban certain types of ammunition, and for what? In the end, it doesn't help anything except for turning the screw of gun ban just a slight bit tighter. You can't legislate your way into a better world without addressing what the cause of your problems are to begin with.
