My neighbour has guns. Lots of guns. Lots and lots and lots of guns. He has more guns than anybody. He’s so obsessed with them that some of his children don’t have shoes and can’t visit a pediatrician when they’re sick, but that doesn’t stop him from buying more and more and more guns.
Having the most guns isn’t enough. He doesn’t want anybody else to have them. Oh, he has a few friends that he allows some guns as long as they’re always on his side, whatever that means, but nobody else can have any. He says guns are dangerous in the wrong hands.
A few years ago, he bullied his buddies into helping him raid a house down the block. He said they had guns. Turns out they didn’t, but now he’s got their house and isn’t sure what to do with it.
Some of the other neighbours want guns now. Some of them want guns so they can acquire more houses, like he did, and some feel they need guns to protect themselves from the other people with guns.
My neighbour sits in the coffee shop and has earnest conversations with his fellow gun owners about how they can keep everybody else from acquiring these dangerous weapons. They have decided to blow up some houses to prevent this, since the raiding thing didn’t work out very well last time.
In none of these discussions have I heard anyone question why it’s a good thing for him to have guns and a bad thing for anyone else. His entitlement is an unspoken assumption: he has more guns because he has more guns because he has more guns.
Lots of the neighbours would like to move, but there’s no place to go.
