Yes, this is as good a time as any to demand gun control

Shall I repeat myself? When people who did not grow up around guns have the audacity to suggest that guns are too readily-available in this country, we immediately stand accused of a) making a tragedy political, b) not actually hating guns, just hating those who aren't coastal elites and using the gun issue as a socially-acceptable way to hate on "Real Americans" or c) being out-of-touch with Gun Culture.

The first two items are basically bad-faith accusations, in that they suggest the outrage that I, for example, feel at a time like this (and add on the usual human emotional provincial thing of, this happened near where I live and grew up, in a place very much like where I live now, and I'm a teacher myself, reading about this between grading final exams) is somehow inauthentic, a mere opportunity to say Go Dems, or to express some kind of pride in not being "flyover" or who knows. This isn't even worth engaging with.

But I'll readily confess to not quite being able to wrap my head around the pro-gun stance. I'm not proud that I don't come from a pro-gun family/community, because this was just chance. I don't have any way of knowing how I'd feel if I'd grown up in a different family/community, any more than I know where I'd have stood had I been born to a slave-owning family in the antebellum South (ha! considering my family's actual conditions at that point in history), or take this to the obvious Godwin conclusion. We are all products of circumstance. Fine. This tells us that we shouldn't consider ordinary people evil, who just believe in what they're told is normal.

But I'm under no cultural-relativist obligation to pretend that being pro-gun is just as valid a stance as wanting the things possessed only by military, law enforcement, and some well-regulated hunting lodges (preferably far, far from any schools). It's obviously necessary for those involved in this from the really pragmatic side, the people who feel as I do but for strategic reasons pretend to only want illegal guns, or certain types of gun, off the streets, to really, really get where the pro-gun contingent is coming from, so as to sensitively, respectfully address their concerns. But me personally, I'm not in the mood to strategize, nor to apologize for a lack of rustic credentials. Just to say my piece on this.