- Stop being poor
- Gun snob
- Shill
- 1 million rounds, no problems
- Works for me
- Fudd
- Tactical Timmy
If you go to any gun relation discussion forum, or Facebook group, or even the big scary thing they call “The real world”, there is no doubt you have seen these terms or heard variations of these things.
It it seems that nowadays it is more acceptable and “cool” to throw out terms such as these than it’s ever been. That isn’t a good thing either. Let’s dive into why it is a cancer within the gun community. My name is Erick and I will be your guide!
Divide and conquer
There has always been the old guard around that shuns anything new. “Black plastic scary assault rifles? Back in my day guns were wood and steel! We used to hike 15 miles uphill, both ways, to get day drunk, beat our wives, then shoot a deer at 1400 yards with my aught six using Remington corelokt!”
Then you have the newer crowd. “Fucking boomers and their deer rifles, the future is now old man! Brb I gotta lay out my clone correct MK18 on my porch and shoot pictures for the ‘gram”. Then they proceed to shoot more pictures of the rifle for Instagram than they have shot rounds through the rifle.
Going back through history there have always been pissing matches between groups of people. The thing with the gun community is, we are all on the same side. Except XD guys and cloners, fuck those guys.
But really, we are all on the same side when it comes to our god given rights. I may not really like shotguns, but that doesn’t mean I think you shouldn’t own them. You like shotguns? Cool, you do you booboo. It’s not my thing, but if that’s what you like, absolutely I will support your rights to own them and do all that you please with them.
Fracturing
Stop being poor!
We we have all heard “stop being poor”. And yeah, for the first couple weeks when that was parroted and regurgitated in every single online discussion group regarding firearms, it was amusing. But here we are millions of times later, and it brings nothing to the discussion. Now I’ll admit I absolutely use this phrase from time to time at work. In person you can use it in a sarcastic manner, or to help coworkers make a poor financial decision buying some awesome stuff. Online it’s basically a drive by comment, and adds absolutely nothing of value to whatever discussion it’s thrown into.
To the person you are saying it to, it actually paints the gun community in a negative light. Here is someone who is proud of their first gun. Doesn’t matter what it is, they are pretty proud of it usually. Give it a few minutes and instead of giving some good real world advice you’ll get the inevitable mouth breather that comes by and posts this. Maybe whatever this person purchased is the results of them scraping up every spare bit of change they could for months, and this is their first major purchase.
Instead of just shitting on them, try offering some real world advice. “Hey man, congrats on your first gun! With (insert whatever they bought here) you might want to take a minute and stake the castle nut since Monkey Fetus Arms Company doesn’t do so, enjoy your purchase”. It doesn’t have to be this verbatim, but if you do feel like commenting, offer some good solid advice. With the way politics and the world is going, the more people on our side the better. What if this person is liberal leaning, and their first immersion into the gun community is a bunch of assholes heckling them and telling them to stop being poor? That might make them be like “Fuck these guys, gun people are assholes”, and permanently change them to be opposed to us.
Being an ambassador
If you do it long enough (*cough cough*), you can get pretty jaded and cynical on everything. Even if you are take a step back and realize that one day you were the person asking for advice. Stop being a dick for a minute and try to help out your fellow brethren. Give them some good advice on motivation. Hell, I cannot tell you how many times I have volunteered my time, guns, and ammo and taken people out to show them the safe and proper way to do things, and not expected anything in return. It is all part of the great circle of life and things. Maybe it will break me out of the hell that I am in one day, or maybe give me good karma? Who knows, but it is the right thing to do.
EZ
*sidenote: Do not know where to really file this one. As of today (5/11/2020) I have 28 draft articles. Shit that I started on while I was all jacked up on pre workout after the gym or when I had motivation to write. This post was done 8/14/2019 and I just ran out of steam and saved it as a draft. Maybe I will call it "the lost files" and just finish up or straight up publish them in the unfinished state to just get content out? All I know is I am just gonna send it. From my keyboard to your ear holes, enjoy it, flaws, foul words and all.