‘Gun culture’

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030113-14958804.htm#4

I enjoyed reading the article “Discredited volume on U.S. gun culture going out of print” (Nation, Friday). However, I must take issue with the use of the phrase “gun culture” in the headline.
“Gun culture” may make sense insofar as it describes the small number of people who actually organize their financial, recreational and social lives around firearms. However, as used most commonly in publishing and broadcasting ? as a synonym for the widespread ownership of firearms ? the phrase is very inaccurate. It denotes that the popularity of firearms is due to habit and enculturation. In fact, the popularity of firearms is the result of practical and logical choices that free people make to solve real and important needs. It occurs with or without cultural encouragement. Whenever people are free to own firearms, large numbers of them do, because firearms are extremely useful tools.
The phrase “gun culture,” used to describe all gun owners, first came into use among gun control advocates who liked the pejorative spin that could be put on the term ? the implication that firearms use is an irrational and outmoded holdover from the past, a tradition overdue to fade from the modern world. Liberal writers soon acquired the same affinity for the phrase.
The broad use of the phrase “gun culture” is the really offensive holdover from the days of an omnipresent liberally biased press, from which I have looked to The Washington Times for escape. I hope I don’t see this phrase used again in your paper (at least without quotation marks), except in its much more limited meaning.

MERRILL GIBSON
Culver City, Calif.