Guns as Cultural Markers and Little Else
By I think the thing that makes me angriest about the gun debate as it currently stands is that the gun-humpers are basically just trolling liberals when they protest so vigorously even the smallest, most reasonable control measures. I mean, at this point, this is not about folks who enjoy hunting or target shooting worrying that their sporting/hobby will be hampered/criminalized in some way. No, at this point, this is just about trolling liberals. Gun-humpers have made the calculation, “Liberals are passionate about gun control; therefore I am against it.”
How do I know this? Well, I think it’s pretty obvious. You can defend your home with a rifle. You don’t need a semi-automatic weapon to hunt or shoot skeet or shoot at targets. The only reason I can imagine a person wanting a weapon like that is because it signifies something. Oh, it doesn’t signify the fact that these folks are willing to go to the war with the government. Dumb as they are, they know they don’t stand a chance against the might of the American military. Even a pretty good Koresh-style stash is no match for a SWAT team. So when wingnuts claim they want to defend themselves against the government, they are, of course being disingenuous.
No, this is all about what having a dangerous weapon, about what having a stash signifies. And right now what that signifies is that you are standing in defiance of a blah president and a whole lot of liberals who are really just worried about babies getting shot in Chicago and children getting slaughtered in Connecticut.
Gun-owning now is largely a cultural signifier and little else. It says something about you if you own a gun. It says something about you if you are for gun control. And the bottom line is that gun-humpers are willing to watch a whole lot more children die so they can thumb their noses at liberals.
It’s an interesting sort of compartmentalization. Because when these people (disingenuously) claim they want to fight the amorphous “tyranny” that wakes them in the middle of the night and has them sweatily dry-humping their guns, they’re forgetting that The Government is their friends and neighbors. It’s the cop down the street; it’s their cousin who’s serving in the military. That’s The Government that they’re talking about when the make their empty threats about fighting tyranny. And I wonder…how do they square that with their fetishization of the military and authority in general?