There’s an unloaded .32 PPK in the closet. It’s been touched about five times in the last 25 years.
As for thoughts? That’s complicated.
As someone who grew up in the rural South many decades ago, I was surrounded by firearms. There was literally nothing remarkable about them… there was no need to remark on something so ubiquitous. Every dad and driving-age teenage boy I knew had a gun rack in the rear window of his pickup that held a loaded rifle with a scope, ready to be pulled out the second someone yelled “deer!”
They were deeply problematic people, but their relationship with their weaponry was always practical. Sure, they proudly showed off the new shotguns they got for Christmas, but they were just shiny new tools… there was little of the fetishization and dick-swinging that is the hallmark of 2021′s gun-culture mainstream. And because guns were in every home, and every boy and girl had fired one by the time they were eight or nine, the firearms themselves had less emotive power.
(I concede that there is an argument for the viability of a 2nd Amendment Paradise: at least in small communities, a universally armed, competent, and homogenous populace can be pretty damned peaceful. But competence and homogeneity don’t scale to the hundreds of millions.)
I should point out one thing (sub)urban folks usually don’t understand: among poor, rural people, guns were more than guns. A man’s gun collection could fill his family’s freezer with food for an entire winter, defend his dogs when a bobcat came prowling at night, and serve as a legacy to be handed down to his kids. For many families, guns were the ultimate investment: something useful, valuable, and easy to liquidate. Before the days of credit cards, a safe full of rifles was better than a bank account in almost every way.
Those folks still exist in many places, and their needs must be understood and respected. (One episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show looks at guns in West Virginia… watch it.) As opposed to the needs of the suburban-commando, inept-trophy-hunter, doing-it-for-the-Gram, I’m-afraid-of-the-world badasses out there, which should be understood and then educated/restricted/fined out of existence.