I first learned about the contradictions of gun politics when I was about 10 years old, growing up in the radical milieu of 1970s Berkeley. My mother and stepfather were members of a revolutionary organization called the International Socialists. Although the group’s members were mostly bookish nerds with little taste for violence, their inspiration was Leon Trotsky, who led the Bolsheviks’ armed insurrection in 1917 and then headed up the Red Army, which killed hundreds of thousands of the Soviet regime’s opponents in the ensuing civil war. Because my parents’ politics were primarily an exercise in middle-class intellectual fantasy, I was never exposed to real violence or even violent rhetoric, and they never owned a gun.
Read the entire column at Reason.