A few years ago I got involved with a local community group whose membership was quite a bit different than the left-leaning activist crowd I’d been accustomed to dealing with. Local farmers, construction workers, a couple of veterans, retirees, and so forth; your typical white, second- and third-generation semi-rural Ontario working-class types. Good people, for the most part, although I knew going in I was going to be dealing with a much more conservative group than I was used to.
But I’m not going to pretend to be someone I’m not, even for the sake of an easy time, so eventually the conversation drifted to politics and it was discovered that I was, in the parlance that a couple of the folks decided to use, a “liberal.” (I don’t describe myself as a liberal, mostly because Canada has a Liberal Party that emphatically isn’t; I prefer the term progressive.) And a couple of the middle-aged men decided to chide me for what they considered my “liberal views” must be; mostly, they harped on the “fact” that I as a “liberal” must be anti-gun. I must want hunting to be illegal. Criminals love unarmed victims. How would I defend my family without a gun, and so forth.
Continue reading “Core Concepts 7 – The Gun Post”