Having grown up steeped in the US gun culture and then left the country, I do notice a real and possibly significant change in the outlook and emphasis within that culture. My memory is that gun life in my youth revolved around hunting and the outdoors... competitive target shooting was a presence but was widely seen as preparation and training to be a more effective outdoorsman. Stalking and woodcraft were seen as goals equal to marksmanship. On the range bolt action rifles with telescopic sights dominated, and the goal was minute of angle accuracy. There was also a faction devoted to light, handy, brush rifles, with a fair bit of debate. Shotguns were for bird hunting. I don't recall ever seeing a centerfire semiautomatic rifle with a magazine above 3 rounds on a range or even in a shop.

Nowadays it seems like the culture revolves around actual or imitation military weapons. The adjective of the day is "tatical", and everything from your flashlight to your underwear is expected to be "tactical". The word, as far as I can tell, seems to have little meaning beyond intent, actual or pretended, to be used in killing people.

I'm not quite sure what to make of all that, but it does seem a rather unsettling shift... again, having been out of the country a long time highlights and possibly exaggerates such changes. I would note that in my entirely subjective opinion close contact with nature and the outdoors tends to produce a degree of sanity and calm, good things for heavily armed people. The idea of people accumulating weapons and other devices purely oriented toward use on people is on some level disturbing, though I wouldn't say prohibition is any answer.

Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
(It'll be interesting to see if "nutjob" passes the obscenity filter here. I still have no good grasp of which words are caught by such filters and which aren't.)
The filters only do English. "Scheisskopf" passes.