Quote one:
Modern society does not help us to put forward our more dignified sides. The public spaces in which we typically encounter others – commuter trains, jostling pavements, shopping malls, escalators, restaurants – conspire to throw up a demeaning picture of our collective identity. It can be hard to keep faith with humanity after a walk down Oxford Street or a transfer at O’Hare. Our capacity to hold on to the concept that every person is necessarily the center of a complex, precious individuality is placed under potentially unbearable stress in the degraded settings where our meetings with our fellow citizens unfold. …- Alain de Botton, Inprovable Feasts, page 7
And quote two:
Beyond mere politices, gun carriers are evangelizing a social philosophy. Belief in rising crime, when statistics show the opposite, amounts to faith in a natural order of predators and prey. … Shooters see their guns as emblems of a whole spectrum of virtuous lifestyle choices—rural over urban, self-reliance over dependence on the collective, vigorous outdoorsiness over pallid intellectualism, patriotism over internationalism, action over inaction—and they hear attacks on guns as attacks on them, personally.- Dan Baum, Happiness is a Worn Gun, pages 31-2
The article on carrying guns in particular is worth reading as a whole, but putting these two observations next to each other really emphasizes the controlled reality that most of us live in. As more and more people are able to choose where they get their news from, they are able to generate a cocoon around themselves where only news and interpretations of the news that already agrees with their mindset prevail. Combine that with the idea behind the first quote – the apt observation that our interactions with “the people” in public settings is dehumanizing – and you can see why many gun owners are so adminent about protecting themselves from “others”. As a gun instructor tells Mr. Baum in his article: “I’m an optimist, but we live in a world of assholes.”
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