First time

The New York Times has an op-ed by Charles M. Blow about his first-time visit to a gub show:

I was in San Antonio, Texas for the college graduation of a nephew when one of my brothers, the one who’s a gun collector, invited me to a local gun show. As he put it: “If you’re gonna write about it, you need to see it.” I jumped at the chance.
As we drove to the Austin Highway Gun Show, we dove headfirst into our gun debate.
He seemed determined to convince me of the futility of many of the national gun control measures now being debated and how they would do little to block criminals from acquiring weapons or mass killers from using weapons.
I was determined to convince him that some new measures were needed to at least put a dent in this country’s abominable gun death numbers.
Indeed, as The Los Angeles Times has noted: “Of 33,636 deaths from firearms counted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2013, some 62 percent, or 21,175, were suicides, and about eleven percent of those were of people ages 5 to 24. Accidental shootings accounted for over five hundred deaths, including seventy victims ranging in age from less than one year to fourteen years.”
My brother and I could both agree that those numbers were too high; we simply disagreed on how best to address it. One area of agreement was to stop the opposition to smart guns, those that can only be fired by their owners or those that are authorized. I framed my argument this way: don’t focus on criminals first; focus on responsible gun owners first.
Shouldn’t those owners, who may simply want a gun for an extra layer of protection, also have the option of buying a gun that they could be sure a small child couldn’t find and use to accidentally shoot a sibling, a friend, or themselves? Shouldn’t those parents have the option of owning a gun that a depressed teen couldn’t use to commit suicide? Shouldn’t they also have the option of owning a gun that a burglar couldn’t steal and use on the rightful owner or take and use in another crime?
These guns, which rely on fingerprint-access technology or radio waves to allow the gun to be fired, could put a huge dent in the number of suicides and accidental deaths.
This seems to me one possible step among many. He also didn’t oppose universal background checks.
My brother’s agreement on this point was a reasonable concession by a reasonable man. Indeed, when we arrived at the gun show, held in a rather nondescript event center with harsh overhead lighting, the one thing my brother wanted to impress upon me was just how “normal” most people were, not the “gun nuts” people accuse them of being.
He had a point, but the somewhat festive environment felt a bit at odds with all the firearms. I was also surprised at how little security there seemed to be. It occurred to me that I had gone through more security at the airport than I had at the gun show.
Inside, there were elderly couples and whole families. I paid particular attention to the children I saw, like the adorable little girl who rode her father’s shoulder as he inspected the wares and the little boy, slumped in this mother’s arms, seemingly slipping off to sleep.
Overall, the word that kept popping into my head was how “pedestrian” it all seemed, especially as I watched my brother— a gregarious man who has never met a person to whom he wouldn’t speak and with whom he wouldn’t laugh— chat up and chuckle with other collectors he recognized from the gun show circuit.
I thought of how productive it would be if more people with discordant views on gun regulations could have as civil a discussion as I had with my brother— full of mutual respect, adults disagreeing but not attempting to demonize, honestly searching for solutions.
The gun lobby poisons these conversations. It pumps out and promotes a never-ending stream of worst-case scenarios until it builds a level of fear and paranoia that only profits gun makers and grinds all progress to a halt.
Indeed, the Austin Highway Gun Show itself published on its Facebook page on 9 December 2015 an image of a gun and a Bible with the caption: “History has shown that these are the first two things banned by totalitarian governments.”
But I must also say that, to a lesser degree, some proponents of better regulations also do damage by painting with too broad a brush and labeling the millions of gun hunters, collectors, and people simply seeking to provide an extra layer of protections for their families, people like my brother and his gun show buddies, as deranged and deficient. Most are not. Many are simply enthusiasts like my brother and the elderly man who climbed out of an SUV as we were about to leave.
My brother bellowed, as is his wont, “How you doing today?” The man responded with a smile, “Any day I can go to a gun show is a good day.”

Rico says it gets easier...