Can someone please explain why the people who absolutely should not be around guns are the ones most avidly defending gun rights? Is it because they know they shouldn’t be within a country mile of a firearm so gun control scares them? Do they just have small dicks and need a gun and pick-em-up truck to affirm their masculinity? What is wrong with these people:
As Jennifer Longdon steered her wheelchair through the Indianapolis airport on April 25, she thought the roughest part of her trip was over. Earlier that day she’d participated in an emotional press conference with the new group Everytown for Gun Safety, against the backdrop of the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. A mom, gun owner, and Second Amendment supporter, Longdon was paralyzed in 2004 after being shot in her car by unknown assailants, and has since been a vocal advocate for comprehensive background checks and other gun reforms.
As Longdon sat waiting for her flight, a screen in the concourse showed footage of the press conference. A tall, thin man standing nearby stared at Longdon, then back at the screen. Then he walked up to Longdon and spat in her face. No one else blinked.
Longdon was shocked and embarrassed, she told me, but she didn’t falter. “Wow, aren’t you a big man,” she said as he turned and walked away. Instead of calling for security, she wheeled herself to a restroom to clean herself off. She was tired—she lives with constant physical pain—and didn’t want to miss her flight.
***After a fundraiser one night during the program, Longdon returned home around 10 p.m., parked her ramp-equipped van and began unloading herself. As she wheeled up to her house, a man stepped out of the shadows. He was dressed in black and had a rifle, “like something out of a commando movie,” Longdon told me. He took aim at her and pulled the trigger. Longdon was hit with a stream of water. “Don’t you wish you had a gun now, bitch?” he scoffed before taking off.
“It was like a mock execution,” Longdon says, recalling the intense surge of adrenaline and how the incident triggered her PTSD from the 2004 attack that nearly killed her and her fiancé. She called the police, but they were unable to track down the perpetrator. By the following Saturday, Longdon was back at her post helping run the buyback.
“I’ve been about as broken as I can be by gun violence,” she says, “so I’m just not going to be afraid of it again.”
The majority of gun owners in America are good people, she adds. “I wish that more responsible gun owners would step into this conversation and say ‘Look, those guys don’t speak for us.'”
These are just damaged, deranged, sad, and because of the current status of gun control, heavily armed sociopaths who shouldn’t be allowed near toenail clippers. This country is nuts.
beth
This is how fucking stupid these people are – if she had a gun, you’d be dead.
Waldo
It’s not for nuthin they’re called gun nuts.
KG
@beth: he was obviously wearing his invincible panties that night
Higgs Boson's Mate
To threaten or attack a woman in a wheelchair is to be a pathetic piece of shit walking around in an ill-fitting man suit.
Owning a fucking howitzer wouldn’t move these assholes one millimeter closer to manhood and, deep down, they know it.
Forked Tongue
Huh? Whut?
Can someone please explain why the people who absolutely should not be around guns are the ones most avidly defending gun rights?
Really? You need that explained?
Hint: It’s because the people who most think they need guns just to cope with living in the modern world are exactly the same ones least able to manage living in the modern world. Is that difficult?
SiubhanDuinne
Did you see our own Southern Beale’s post on the female mannequin target?
These people are beyond pathological.
Omnes Omnibus
Rhetorical question, right?
Hunter Gathers
They’re afraid that they won’t be able to fulfill their greatest fantasy: shooting someone for committing the crime of wearing a hoody while carrying a bag of Skittles. Or playing the hip-hop to loudly. Or just for being near.
The Bearded Blogger
I think Jim Carrey captured the psychology and “spirituality” of those types rather nicely in his “Cold dead hands” song….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Wn3Eey6dY
trollhattan
This makes a fine pairing with today’s revelation of Sandy Hook truthers. We are a sick, sick people.
Morzer
These people are just sad, frightened little losers in a culture that promotes paranoia and justifies violence.
The Bearded Blogger
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Those shites cling to their guns because they desperately want to be in fights, but NEED those fights to be unfair.
Tokyokie
A few days ago, some of these losers were doing some sort of open-carry protest near my house, and I rolled down my window to tell the one standing in the median with his assault rifle that people who feel compelled to publicly display and even fondle their penile substitutes are not patriots, they’re perverts, and they’re all mentally unfit to have guns. Alas, he moved across the street to rejoin his clan of perverts, and I literally wasn’t going to drive out of my way to deal with them.
But they’re perverts, believing in pathetic delusions of dispensing violence, and the only difference between the NRA and NAMBLA is that the former is socially acceptable. And it’s high time to change that and for non-perverts to call them what they are: sick and twisted perverts.
Wag
I;m not sure i’d let them near toenail clippers, either,. The risk of toenail fungus after 10 clips for some of these monsters’ feet could be deadly.
The Other Chuck
Here’s the thing: I used to try to reason with the gun nuts. Told them I respected the second amendment and all that, and no, I didn’t support rounding up their guns.
Now? I think the second amendment was the second biggest mistake since slavery, and I’m all for taking their guns away. These people aren’t defending us from tyranny — they are tyranny.
Wag
@The Bearded Blogger:
This, too
NotMax
Real close friend, one whose home is chock-a-block with guns (locked in a safe), swords, knives, etc. – he just a thing for them, but is an aware and responsible owner – and with whom have had a mutual pact to agree to disagree and try to avoid discussing guns and Second Amendment issues for over 25 years now, came up to me at our group’s weekly gathering two weeks ago and said, “I want to apologize. You’ve been right all this time.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Wag:
They’re called magazines, not clips!
/gun nut
? Martin
I think Frum nailed it.
(with much condensing on my part)
burnspbesq
If I were to walk into a fast food joint, convenience store, or supermarket and encounter a bunch of open-carry advocates, I would call 911, loudly. Given the abysmal state of training of most gun fetishists, they’re all inherently dangerous. Yeah, it’s harassment; you’re damn right it’s harassment. I’m being harassed by an armed man. In most states, that’s still assault with a deadly weapon. And yes, I’ll press charges. Especially if it’s Los Angeles County, where the DA is a buddy of mine from law school.
The Bearded Blogger
@NotMax: For like a decade now, I’ve been wondering when/whether Americans will have this moment of realization that they’ve gone way off the deep end, a kind of whoa moment. I picture it as a collective realization, but it seems to be more of a steady trickle, person by person.
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Makes one look anew and askance at all those kids of yore who proverbially worked their way through college by selling magazines.
Omnes Omnibus
@burnspbesq: I am sure some ambitious prosecutor would be able to construct a conspiracy charge.
leeleeFL
Saw this story earlier and would have thought it was proof that the end was around the corner….but I had seen the article about the psycho who told the SandyHook Mom her child did not exist. Sadly, the end is not here yet…we will live with this mental illness a while longer methinks….more’s the pity.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
Toe magazines sounds like a thing for fetishists….
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax: One thing that I find amusing about the gun nuts who insist on magazine instead of clip is that, in the army, clip was a perfectly acceptable informal term. Calling an M-16 a gun was not acceptable even informally; weapon, rifle, or M-16 were pretty much the only terms that I remember being okay. Gun nuts get pedantic over things that don’t mean shit to professionals and then call their weapons guns when, to a professional, gun has a specific meaning.
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: I don’t judge people’s personal foibles as long as they involve consenting adults.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s a reasonable position, provided we stipulate that Jets’ fans are incapable of giving informed consent.
NotMax
@The Bearded Blogger
Nothing to do with guns, but that triggered memory of an absolutely true cute anecdote from many years back.
Mother, her closest friend (who was a Seventh Day Adventist, which makes it even funnier) and I stopped in someplace in Manhattan for coffee and a nosh after visiting a museum or some such outing.
At the next table a couple of out-of-towners were chowing down. One of them said to the other, loudly enough to be overheard, “So this is a bagel. They’re great!”
Mother’s friend leaned over and announced in a stage whisper, “Now let me tell you about the rest of the religion!”
Hilarity ensued.
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: So stipulated.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
There really is nothing as satisfying as a good old-fashioned bipartisan consensus.
Tokyokie
@burnspbesq: If assault is the express or implied threat of violence to force another person to change his or her lawful behavior, then open carry constitutes assault. Unfortunately, perverts in the judiciary have determined that the right to bear arms, whenever and wherever one chooses, is superior to the common-law expectation one has of going about one’s lawful business without suffering a threat of violence, and that the only legal remedy is to similarly publicly disply a firearm.
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Ditto the Marines.
Wag
@Morzer:
This. Missing from too much of America
Suffern ACE
@leeleeFL: sadly, I don’t think it goes away. Can we name one conspiracy that has diminished in acceptance since the invention of the web? I can’t. Cripes, no matter how many interviews he gives, people will still believe that Mikey died of a pop rocks and coca cola explosion and will believe that P&G are Satanists, probably covering up Mary Magdalen’s marriage.
marduk
That story about being spit on is a lie and no True Patriotic Gun Owner would ever behave that way.
If I could find that lying liar I would spit in her face.
We should find her and spit in her face.
-every gun rights forum
trollhattan
Oopsie.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/15/sc-woman-fires-shot-at-friend-to-test-his-bulletproof-vest-but-she-misses-and-hes-dead/
some guy
nothing good ever comes out of a gun
burnspbesq
OT:
If you are short popcorn futures, close that position right now, before you get bankrupted.
http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/10939318/los-angeles-clippers-owner-donald-sterling-pay-fine-sue-nba-according-sources
some guy
write LTE, demanding to know why your local Republicans are so committed to the idea that the mentally unstable should have access to high powered weaponry.
the Conster
I’m not sure it’s mental illness, but gun nuttery is a sickness for sure.
Morzer
@trollhattan:
You have to marvel at the idea of testing your friend’s Kevlar by blasting away at him with serious firepower.
MobiusKlein
2000 comments on that Mother Jones thread.
Holy crap, that’s a lot of hate
Fuzzy
@burnspbesq: I hope I see one of these open carry assholes so I can dial 911 to report it.
some guy
via ALEC, unfettered access to high power weapons.
Cliven Bundy, minions, sovereignity.
white peoplez
Morzer
@MobiusKlein:
Are you really surprised by the hatred those people express for the human race?
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Omnes Omnibus:
Guess we weren’t professional enough down in that ol’ Mekong Delta because we called them clips.
The nuts calling their weapons guns is hilarious. In boot camp if you called your rifle a gun you then had to shout:
“This is my rifle,
This is my gun,
One is for shooting,
The other’s for fun,”
while running full bore back and forth across the grinder with your rifle held at arm’s length over your head.
some guy
the soft bigotry of low expectations, when extreme gun nuts can spit on “reasonable” gun users
Omnes Omnibus
@trollhattan: Idiocy and involuntary manslaughter. Unfortunately, only one is a crime.
Jack the Second
@Omnes Omnibus: “Clip” versus “magazine” isn’t pedantic, it’s a shibboleth. They aren’t angry because you used the term wrong, they’re angry because if you say “clip” instead of “magazine”, it indicates you aren’t “one of them”.
burnspbesq
@Tokyokie:
Fortunately (or unfortunately, given these idiots’ tendency to walk around with safeties off and rounds in chambers), if you get more than one open-carry advocate in the same place at the same time, one of them is likely to pull it out and brandish it, and that’s where they cross the line into ADW.
Morzer
@burnspbesq:
If we could persuade them to shoot each other, that might be a partial solution to the problem.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@burnspbesq:
When that happens the NRA will find a case somewhere, push it all the way to SCOTUS. The conservative majority will then rule that shooting someone is a form of speech.
Omnes Omnibus
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: My gun nut cousin (who is also a member of Arpaio’s volunteer posse in AZ) posts weird shit about clips v. magazines on facebook to “prove” that people in favor of regulation don’t know anything. I point out that the military is cool with the term clip and note that a 30 round mag is often called a “banana clip” and get crickets in response. I can’t defriend her (her dad is my brother’s boss and I don’t want to cause him any trouble), but I have hidden her shit.
Mnemosyne
So gun advocates are going to prove they’re rational people by threatening to kill gunshot victims?
Ooookay.
some guy
I am 100% pow pow powsitive Eric Holder and the Secreteray of the Interior will deal aporopriately with armed thugs pointing weapons at the police just south of Las Vegas.
any day now
some guy
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
see Martin, Trayvon
NotMax
@trollhattan
From the story (emphasis mine): Deputies said they found no evidence of heavy alcohol or drug use.
The gri-gri was not strong with that one.
Or he touched a menstruating woman or walked under a clothesline with panties on it. Or both.
From the link:
Joel Hanes
@The Bearded Blogger:
I’ve been wondering when/whether Americans will have this moment of realization that they’ve gone way off the deep end
Some of us have been having that moment of realization, daily, ever since Buffalo Springfield recorded For What It’s Worth
Nixon ? Really? and then CREEP and Watergate and Agnew
Ford Whipping inflation with pin-on buttons
Reagan ? The actor? The GE corporate spox ?
Clinton and this one they impeach. Holy yumpin yeesus
W and darkness covered the land, and evil deeds done in the darkness
Obama is near
We went off the deep end when JFK died, and have never recovered.
Mnemosyne
@some guy:
Average temperatures in Las Vegas by month:
May 88° F (31° C)
June 100° F (38° C)
July 106° F (41° C)
August 103° F (39° C)
I’m fine with letting nature take its course.
ETA: And we haven’t even taken monsoon season into account. Most non-desert-dwellers have no idea how to deal with a flooded wash — hell, even a lot of desert dwellers end up fucking up and trying to drive through it.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
They’re conservatives.
the Conster
@some guy:
You know, that’s such a cheap and easy thing to say. Think about this. You’ve got some large percentage of white men in America having some kind of mental breakdown/existential mid life crisis because of the near sheriff, armed to the teeth and just loving the idea of someone watering the tree of liberty with Eric Holder (or his proxy) and sparking something across the land. Those fat assed clowns will burn themselves out, then you pick them up, one by one. It’s not getting any cooler in Nevada, and the government owns the land.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jack the Second: You are probably right, but it is funny that, for a while, my profession involved the use of these devices, but because I don’t agree with their conclusions, my opinion and expertize are dismissed. My cousin lives in a half million dollar house paid for by her father and has never worked or been anyplace where she was in actual danger. Higgs Bosun’s Mate spent time in an environment where having a weapon could mean the difference between living and dying. My cousin would dismiss any thing he said if he used the word clip. I really can’t stand these people.*
*Full disclosure: I own three firearms, two shotguns and a rifle. I didn’t buy any of them – two were gifts, one was inherited. The only one that matters to me is the one I inherited. My grandfather bought in in 1921 when he was 18 and it represented about 6 months of his wages. As he was a remarkably frugal man, this expense is significant. I use it for bird hunting and trap shooting.
Citizen_X
@burnspbesq:
Careful:
Omnes Omnibus
@the Conster: Yep. No reason to provoke a confrontation. Grab ’em as they get dehydrated and slink away. Patience is underrated.
Citizen_X
As for me, I’m only referring to the female ones as gun nuts. The “men” are gun bitches.
Yes, maybe that’s not pc, but fuck these guys.
Mnemosyne
OT, but here’s a strange story I just stumbled across. Remember Bush lawyer Jay Bybee? His adult son committed suicide outside of their Mormon temple.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: The fact that Bybee is a Circuit Court Judge is an abomination, but it is sad that his son committed suicide.
? Martin
@Citizen_X: I’m with Burnsey. These dipshits don’t need to make threats, they’re already armed. If they had the balls to follow through with their ideology, they’d just up and shoot us. I’ll call them goddamn cowards every day of the week.
El Caganer
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s probably the best plan. When Ike had his sedition problem in Little Rock, he sent in the 101st Airborne, but I don’t think that’s called for here.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Is it bad to say that if my father had participated in the torture of hundreds (if not thousands) of people, I’d be pretty goddamned depressed, too?
Omnes Omnibus
@El Caganer: I don’t need the “satisfaction” of a confrontation. I want the people who have broken laws to be brought to trial. I don’t need to happen now, right now.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Okayed, didn’t participate in.
I don’t think that the sins of the father should be visited upon the son.
schrodinger's cat
OT: I am live blogging the Indian election results. So far a clean sweep for the BJP.
Citizen_X
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Well, pistols, rifles, and shotguns can all be properly termed “small arms.” But something tells me the NRA membership would consider that too…diminutive.
the Conster
@El Caganer:
Ike was dealing with a head of government. Holder is dealing with a bunch of delusional ass clowns.
KG
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: nah, they’ll just apply old west law… Such as, if they were both armed, it was a fair fight and thus not murder. Just a misunderstanding
KG
@the Conster: so was Washington with the Whiskey Rebellion
hitchhiker
Jennifer Longdon is a personal friend of mine. She’s got more game than you can even start to imagine. Drive by shooter leaves her paralyzed and her fiance blind and brain-damaged. She’s got a goddamn punch card for the ER after having to haul herself in there over and over because she’s had so many infections that it always takes some monster antibiotics to keep her alive.
And some shrivel-dick fool SPITS on her for daring to suggest that a background check might not be a bad idea.
I. just. can’t.
Omnes Omnibus
@Citizen_X: This is a gun.
Morzer
@schrodinger’s cat:
I find that deeply depressing, after having done some research on Narendra Modi. This piece by William Dalrymple was especially convincing:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/narendra-modi-man-masses
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
Can you imagine the amount of boner pills needed to get that monster upright?!
Omnes Omnibus
@hitchhiker: Assholes are assholes.
the Conster
@KG:
Would Washington have used drones?
schrodinger's cat
@Morzer: I don’t like him either. However I can understand the frustration and need for change that most people feel about decades of ineffective and nepotist rule by the Congress. I just wish the BJP had chosen someone else.
SatanicPanic
I’m a moral relativist- there are reason for doing just about any awful thing, but I can’t for the life of me think of a realistic excuse for spitting on a woman in a wheelchair. This man should go to jail, because seriously, I don’t see anything good coming from him in the future.
Morzer
@schrodinger’s cat:
To be honest with you, I think Modi is exactly the sort of leader the BJP wants to produce. I’ve followed the BJP’s activities over the years – and I can’t say I like much of what I have seen from them. I agree that Congress is corrupt and inept (and has been that way for much of its existence, in my opinion) – but I think the BJP is going to cause immense problems of its own if it gets real power.
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: Those fuckers were the most accurate guns the army ever had. With accurate call for fire, I could hit a house more than ten miles away with my guns.
And oddly, if the barrel was completely upright, it meant that something was wrong with it. To get at the engine, one needed to elevate the barrel completely. Seeing one of your unit’s guns like that was embarrassing.
Edited.
schrodinger's cat
@Morzer: There is nothing in your comment that I disagree with.
ETA: Now Gujarat’s shame is India’s shame.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
I just visions of you guys shoveling 3 McCain units of boner pills into it to achieve “lift-off”. I blame Cole for dancing around pant-less on the roof.
KG
@the Conster: sure, after Hamilton convinced him it was a good idea
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Parking at the mall must be a real bitch.
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: I shoveled nothing. Ask raven, Cassidy, and HBM, officers are special and they suck. But they don’t shovel anything – except bullshit to senior officers (I think that mattered a lot.)
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax: In Germany, my unit stuck the barrel of a gun through some German guy’s bedroom window. We put people at every corner that could be a problem to guide folds through it, but mistakes happen. Checks were written.
cckids
@Mnemosyne: Though they’re not south of Vegas, they are north & east. Temps will be a bit lower, but it is getting very hot very fast. Hopefully the FBI will get done “investigating” and make things even hotter for those jackasses.
gussie
Frankly, all this ‘professionals never say _gun_!’ stuff is kinda nutty, too.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: May be other officers, not you.
Ruckus
@Morzer:
Really.
One shouldn’t be surprised that people who are too afraid to be part of society hate every one who isn’t.
TheMightyTrowel
@schrodinger’s cat: Yikes. Thanks for keeping us up to date!
Omnes Omnibus
@gussie: I disagree. Professionals have jargon and/or term of art. Gun nuts don’t know the terms. It shows their distance from people who actually work with the tools (guns) that they fetishize.
schrodinger's cat
@TheMightyTrowel: You are welcome, I predict a hard right turn in India’s future.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: I saw one of the main parts of my job as keeping senior people from interfering with my guys’ ability to do their jobs. I ran interference with the brass while my sergeants mad sure the work got done.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Morally, that’s even worse (IMO). The guys who did the dirty work got their orders from higher up.
Not what I was saying. More like, how do you deal with the fact that your father committed a horrible crime, especially when he got away with it and keeps justifying himself? It would certainly make me question any belief in God that I had.
Mnemosyne
@cckids:
I don’t know if you’re getting or will be getting the same weather we’re getting in So Cal, but it was 103 degrees today. In May.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Once in the captains stateroom doing some work on an electronic unit the captain remarked that it was amazing how fast I got there to do the work. I told him that I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to get my fucking ass to his stateroom faster than fast or the capt would have all of my ass. He just shook his head and told me that he had made a remark in passing that it would be nice if someone could fix this item when we had time, but it truly wasn’t important. There were only 3 people between the capt and myself on that ship, all officers. The captains second remark was, “What a bunch of assholes” I was forced to agree with him. In 4 yrs he was the only officer that I wouldn’t put into that category. Tonight I’ll add you. But it does seem like a shame that your real job was to be a buffer between the bullshit and the work.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: I don’t buy generational guilt. I get that he was bothered by what his father did. He, to our knowledge, did not fuck people over.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
This has a couple of guns along with some assorted other things that go boom.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Other Chuck:
Precisely. Glibertarians in general are all tyrant wannabes. Only their rights are important…the rights of anyone else are in their fucking way.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus
Ideally, yes. In the best of all possible worlds.
But we don’t live in that world. All you have to do is see the installation of the deserting coward in the White House to understand family connections are more important than individual merit.
But when social position and wealth are more often acquired through birth, rather than any personal effort, I have no problem with saddling the son with the sins of the father. Because that’s a check and balance on aristocratic privilege..
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus:
Any mid-level management job works that way.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
True but still what a waste of time and effort.
Does sort of prove that Peter got his principle correct so there is an upside.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Still not getting where you see some claim of “generational guilt.” I’m saying that if my father was a torturer, I would be pretty fucking depressed about it, too.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Fine. Have it as you will. For how many generations should his descendents be depressed? One, two, seventeen?
AxelFoley
@The Bearded Blogger:
If Newtown/Sandy Hook couldn’t change our collective thoughts on this, I don’t think things will ever change.
M. Bouffant
Some gun loon will eventually pull the trigger on a “gun-grabber,” abortion doctor-style. Then we’ll see if the Second Amendment trumps the First.
Anonymous
This is not a generous way of thinking, but our white lower middle class is having the same general cultural and economic breakdown as the German did in the 1930’s and the modern Russian one is now. Part of it is expressed in gun hysteria. I hesitate to say that the only correction is the same correction that appeared in Germany in the 40’s (huge percent of male population physically mutilated or dead in war, huge percentage of female population permanently broken by gang rape), but it would be great if someone would just cull these people.
balconesfault
@trollhattan: that’s gotta deserve a Darwin Award
LosGatosCA
@? Martin:
Gun owner supremacy – it’s the new white.
Platypus
Why do the unsuitable ones have guns? Projection. They think everyone else is as irrational and impulse-driven as they are, and if those other people have guns then damn, they’d better have guns too. It never even occurs to them that *they themselves* are the threat, because part of projection is avoidance of the truth as it applies to oneself.
Platypus
Why do the unsuitable ones have guns? Projection. They think everyone else is as irrational and impulse-driven as they are, and if those other people have guns then damn, they’d better have guns too. It never even occurs to them that *they themselves* are the threat, because part of projection is avoidance of the truth as it applies to oneself.
Applejinx
You know, if you could ask these people ‘what makes you feel so unbearably powerless that owning deadly weapons personally is such a life-or-death matter’ then maybe we’d be getting somewhere.
Because they can’t let it go, and it’s for reasons, and I think we can relate with those reasons more than you’d suspect. I doubt it’s all stupid racism and sexism, for instance.
It’s sort of like ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’, really. You’ve got your gunslingers, and the railroad is going to roll right over them whatever they do. Their jobs are sold off to China and India by corporations, they have to live in a lowest-common-denominator world where everything is exactly as shitty as the statistical average person can stand without flipping out and wrecking shit, and you ask why they’re desperate and crazy? They are exactly as crazy as (the decline and fall of) capitalism compels them to be.
And since that’s pretty crazy, they’ll go to any length to protect their ability to flip out and go down in a blaze of glory. I know a gun crazy who’s been venting his feelings in amateur filmmaking for years, he’s damn good at it. He makes movies of him in typically German tanks and bombers, going to blow up Town Offices… and, if I’m remembering correctly, banks.
The psychology isn’t solely the posturing hero fighting baddies. They can also see themselves as the warrior against giant evil forces. I happen to think there ARE a lot of giant evil forces around, it’s just that I don’t see specifically Obama (or health care, or welfare and social services) as representing them…
Ask yourself, if these guys all put down their guns peaceably, what would they still be rightly scared of? Because you’re a damned fool if you think they are fifties bourgeuoisie floating on a raft of privilege. All they have is being white, male, and having a gun. And being white and male absolutely will not protect you from Bank Of America, or from Wal-Mart destroying your hardware store, or even from the average person steadily becoming brown and maybe not even speaking English.
Disarmament is useless without comprehensive populist politics. In a world where Bank Of America can take your house, be WRONG and still do it and pay no consequences and literally ruin your life for nothing, the final power you have (since you can’t hunt down the person who did it, it’s the system that did it) is a bullet to your own head.
If you don’t understand that, you will never be able to understand the gun nuts, and if you can’t also focus on fixing the systemic problems you have no hope of disarming them.
Citizen_X
@Applejinx: You may have a point, but if you try to fix those systemic problems, these are the people who will stalk you and threaten to kill you.
Until they turn off Fox and put down the popgun (by their own will, or if some of them end up dead or in prison), they’ll be impossible to deal with.
The Bearded Blogger
@Applejinx: Agree heartily with like 90% of your post, but you seem to say that only when the systemic problems that cause the fear and anguish of gun nuts disappear will we be able to disarm them. I agree that gun-nuts are a symptom, but it is quite possible to treat a symptom before treating the cause of a disease.
Also, I think the US needs its pride back, something like a new Apollo program. Maybe catastrophic climate change will be the catalyst for that
Morzer
@Applejinx:
I see what you are saying, but I’d be a lot more convinced if the gun nuts weren’t consistently on the crazier edge of the crazy right wing – and if I saw them taking action against the corrupt banks like Bank of America.
The Bearded Blogger
@? Martin: thanks for the Frum link, it’s pretty good
Southern Beale
I post a weekly round-up of gun lunacy from across the state and this week’s Tennessee Gun Report got trolled by some folks who heard about it at a pro-gun website (at least, according to my stats that’s what happened). The people who tell me to eat shit and die I delete but if you want to have a sensible discussion that’s ok. But the thing about it is, this one guy who is commenting is expressing a really bizarre worldview that I just can’t fathom.
He says that it’s “ironic” that I’m able to make snide comments about gun loons using my 1st Amendment rights which, he says, I only have because of people like him exercising their 2nd Amendment rights. In other words, he and his friends are just convinced that the only reason this country is as free as it is today is because of all the millions of firearms in the hands of citizens.
And it’s not foreign governments he’s afraid of, oh no. He says it’s he and his gun-toting friends who keep “the ever growing Big Government from stripping all of our rights away, including the 1st Amendment.” He’s not talking in the abstract. He’s actually living in a world where he thinks Obama’s jack-booted thugs want to take everyone’s freedoms away.
This is so crazy and sad that people are really that out there.
pseudonymous in nc
The corollary to “assume all guns are loaded” is “assume all gun-toters are dangerous.” And yet for some reason this offends gun-toters, even when it’s applying their own “tactical” mentality.
feebog
@Applejinx:
It may not be 100 percent racism and sexism, but those are very significant components. Go on some of their websites, read the comments, and get back to us.
pseudonymous in nc
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s a version of the tone argument, and a means of exerting control: if you don’t use the precise terminology we dictate, then we won’t listen to you. Well, fuck that shit: get yourself a medical degree and learn the precise terminology to describe bullet wounds before you start pontificating about the word ‘clip’.
Patricia Kayden
@The Other Chuck: Amen. I have no problems with guns being taken away from fruitcakes. They are dangerous. It feels as if the NRA has no effective opposition.
Jebediah, RBG
@Applejinx:
coincidentally, just as I was reading your comment, my Pandora had Naked Raygun singing “Now I know where snipers come from…”
Jebediah, RBG
@Southern Beale:
Yeah, at least some of them seem to think they are protecting Truth, Freedom, and The American Way but what they are doing is dancing right up to the edge of armed insurrection. That’s a very dangerous gambol for all of us.
Helen
@Applejinx: Thank you for this. I have been trying to find a way to articulate exactly what you said. You were way more successful than I.
I would also like to add this: This is a group of people who grew up believing with all their might and hearts that people who were unemployed and depended on the government we mooching, lazy, nears. They believed that if you were willing to work hard it protected you from poverty and unemployment. Then 2008 happened. And a whole boatload of them were thrown out of work. They had never, ever thought that it would happen to them. But it did. And they had to apply for food stamps, welfare, heating assistance, and a myriad of other government programs. Imagine the cignitive dissonance that caused. They were just like the nears.
I think that also goes a long way to explain them believing in massive voter fraud. They would never, ever, even under penalty of death, vote for a near. So surely other Americans would not either. Therefore there had to be voter fraud.
Southern Beale
@Applejinx:
Because as I wrote yesterday, it’s not about guns. It’s about power. And their lack of it.
A lot of these folks are completely uneducated about the reasons for their powerlessness. I’m not saying some may not have good jobs, I know one who is the head of a local (real, not imaginary) police force, but his identity is wrapped up in being a Southern, white, male and Christian so the idea of reading a newspaper or finding out what’s happening in China or recognizing that what big banks are doing on Wall Street affects him in his little Tennessee town is completely alien to him. Easier to believe the dumbed-down talking point about “big bad government” trying to “steal his freedom,” than wonder why Comcast and Verizon want to snuff out a free and open internet.
The Raven on the Hill
“Can someone please explain why the people who absolutely should not be around guns are the ones most avidly defending gun rights?”
They’re obsessed. Nucking futz. Stark staring bonkers.
eyelessgame
“Can someone please explain why the people who absolutely should not be around guns are the ones most avidly defending gun rights?”
Yeats had the explanation, or at the least phrased it best.