Jonathan Last is shocked to discover that gun owners are not only human, but they're, well...good people.

And I'm shocked to discover that the editor of the Weekly Standard on-line is shocked by this. This, to me, is simply evidence of how pervasive anti-gun hysteria is in our culture.

This reminded me somewhat of an article I had read some time ago in Reason Magazine. Yup, it's still online. Here is an excerpt and the URL if anyone wishes to read it.

There was a time when I would not have wanted to touch a gun of any kind, much less spend part of an afternoon riding the back of a rocking mechanical pony and blazing away at a series of targets with revolvers, rifles, and shotguns. But that improbable picture is the culmination of a journey that took me from the ivory towers of academia to the shooting ranges of Northern California. Bluntly, I was surprised by what I found there. As a practicing anthropologist, I had set out in search of gun crazies, but what I found were regular folks -- enthusiasts who relate to their guns in generally socially positive ways. These people are usually ignored by most media accounts of America?s "gun culture." What follows is the story of how I came to make that discovery, and some brief sketches of the sorts of people who make up America?s much-maligned and misunderstood gun culture. Or, perhaps more accurately, America?s gun cultures.

http://reason.com/0105/fe.ak.their.shtml

I remember the Reason article and had a similar reaction to it. The most remarkable revelation from such articles isn't that gun owners are normal, it's how sheltered and parochial are the educated Americans who think that this is news.