Let's learn about guns!

I'm liberal.  Really liberal.  I don't like President Obama because he's not nearly liberal enough.  Coincidentally, most of my social circle leans leftward politically.  And that means that most of them are in favor of gun control.  But I'm pretty pro-gun.

I'm not interested in debating the gun issue here.  What I've found most frustrating about this subject is that the pro-gun control half of the equation often has a poor grasp of the most basic gun facts.  This isn't a put down, most of us are ignorant of many hot social topics; I find economics baffling and therefore tend to keep my mouth shut.

What I want to do is make any discussion of the gun issue productive rather than an exercise in head banging frustration for those of my ilk.  It makes it hard to discuss the important aspects of guns, gun crime, and violence in America when we spend half of our time correcting the many falsehoods often believed by gun control people.

So no politics here.  I will not try to convince you how groovy guns are or how the U.N. is coming to take our freedoms away.  I will instead give clear explanations and definitions of terms that gun control people frequently get wrong.  In all fairness, many gun owners have no idea what they are talking about.  You'll hear as much misinformation in a gun store as anywhere else.