Because I grew up in Kansas, I have a lot of right wing gun nutz that I went to high school with in my facebook newsfeed. (I added a lot of them before my class reunion and have been to lazy to remove them from the feed.) The one theme that seems to run through their posts is paranoia. Somehow, having a gun makes them feel less vulnerable or gives them a sense of power over their lives. These are the same people who post about their praise of God at every turn. There was lots of gloating over the NRA's defeat of any gun laws and anti Obama posts.
For the most part I just ignore these displays of ignorance and paranoia, but lately the paranoia has been getting worse. The idea that registering a gun necessarily leads to confiscation reaches an almost clinical level of paranoia. The almost glee at saying "I guess now all the dems will want to ban pressure cookers," just makes me want to scream.
When I almost found myself hoping that the Boston bombing was an act of domestic terrorism, I knew that it was time to get my feelings out in the form of a diary. After 9/11 I was in a graduate level class and as everyone else talked about how much the US needed to change to meet the new "threat", my comment was "the US is goingto change because of 9/11 but it should not." Unfortunately after Boston, it is likely to change for the worse again.
As the song says "there's a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware." Well I for one am not going down the paranoia rabbit hole. A little paranoia is good, but when it is allowed to run one's life, trouble begins. Now I will go back to lurking.