Attempts by various politicians and interest groups, almost universally hailing from those urban areas with both very strict gun control and very high gun crime, to impose those laws on more rural regions with both very lax gun control and relatively low gun crime tend to smack of a sort of internal imperialism. This is responsible for much of the rancor of the debate, in my opinion.

I’m not especially motivated to invest in gun ownership myself, so the fact it is a greater pain in Canada doesn’t bother me much. Similarly, my city’s crime rate and my way of life don’t seem to suggest self-defence with one is all that likely to be necessary. So I have more or less let time pass without doing more. But I’m pretty broadly in sympathy with Americans who want to defend their 2nd Amendment rights. Always have been.

One thing though, it seems to me as an observer that both camps have dug in on fairly extreme positions. Gun controllers have determined that, alone of the Bill of Rights and contrary to the semantic structure of it, the 2nd Amendment does not protect an individual right. That strikes me as obtuse. But the defenders of gun rights have now reached the point of refusing any limits at all, even where the safety of others is concerned. That’s also beyond the way the rest of the Bill of Rights is handled. At least the major ones — even free speech has always faced public safety and libel boundaries.

I get why one would not want to concede that point in the modern climate — give an inch and they will take a mile, for sure — but it does strike me as inconsistent with the way Americans have historically defended their other constitutional rights.

To take one idiosyncratic point of view, I have a hard time understanding why private businesses, churches, or all manner of establishments should not have the right to restrict guns on their premises.

“Gun control is just a public act of piety.”

And yes, do stop calling it a gun problem:

“The truth is America does not have a gun problem or even a murder problem. America has a black guy problem. According to the Federal government, young black males make up 3% of the population and commit 27% of the homicides.”

Other big minorities aren’t much better:

“While illegal immigrants account for about 3.5 percent of the U.S population, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences in FY 2014 following criminal convictions, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News.

But you never hear about “the minority problem”. I can’t find even one minority safety program!

The mistake here (again) is in not understanding the debate. Progressives don’t care about guns. They care about who they imagine are the gun owners. Neo-Puritan fanatics associate guns with southerners in particular and bad whites in general. It’s the tool of the sinful. They believe this with the intensity of a zealot because it is wrapped up in how they define themselves as the anointed.

Gun control is a religious argument. Therefore, facts and reason have no impact on the believers. These charts have been shown to these lunatics for decades. The statistics of crime have been explained for half a century. The illogical of gun control has been detailed for as long as I have been alive. Yet, the true believers belied ever more intensely.”

And why should the pro-gun side concede anything? Karl Denninger argues:

“The Constitution means what it says; particularly the Second Amendment. I need no damn permit to exercise a fundamental right and you had better stand up for that and make it so throughout the United States. I’m tired of you telling me I need a “permit” to have a fighting chance against some jacked-up thug. God allegedly made all men and women equal (so says our Constitution) but Samuel Colt equalized the odds between a 100lb woman and a 250lb thug and we expect so-called Conservatives to uphold and enforce our right to defend our own lives without having to ask permission from big-brother Government first.

They don’t believe it is possible to safely use a gun.