Taking Aim at Stupidity in GOP La-La Land
Tell Me It's Not True
The following has been reedited and condensed from Vox.com and a very good article … it now fits the blog format with no loss of content or intent. Enjoy.
To
hardcore Conservative Republicans, unlimited and untouchable guns and the more
the merrier, have become their last-ditch effort to impose control on a world they
believe is slipping away. Imagine this scenario of a typical GOP conservative
gun owner.
He
is an older white male, say, in his 50s, living in the Rust Belt or Deep South.
He will tell you that when he was growing up, there was living memory of a
familiar order: Men working hard in an honorable trade or manufacturing job,
women tending home and children, Sundays were for church, hard work yielding a
steady rise up the social ladder to a well-earned house, yard, and car were
dreams to be had by everyone. That social order in his memory was crumbling
just as our gun owner inherited it.
The
honorable jobs are gone, or going (even though he refuses to believe it’s his
political side that shipped jobs off-shore for huge profits and tax shelters).
It's
pure hell to find good-paying work (even he refuses to support raising the
minimum wage and having decent affordable healthcare). Jobs with any benefits
are for shit. He can’t put much aside for retirement because he doesn’t make
much to take home. His kids are struggling with debt and low-paying jobs and
high college debt (even though he won’t push his members of Congress to take
steps to lower student debt). They know, all the gun owners know, that their
kids probably aren't going to have a better life than the did — that the very
core of the American promise has proven false for them, for the first time in
generations and they are fed up.
It's
a bitter, helpless feeling for them. For someone naturally attuned to “order,
structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity,” well,
it’s damn scary and they are quick to tell you that, too. The role he thought
he was meant to play in the world, the privileges and respect that came along
with that dream, have been thrown into doubt. Everything is shifting under his
feet.
Over
the last few years, our gun owner has found a whole network of TV channels,
radio shows, books, blogs, and Facebook groups that speak directly to his
unease. They understand the world he heard about from his father and
grandfather, the world that's being lost; they understand the urgency of saving
what's left of it.
Most
of all, with his already heightened sensitivity to threat further aggravated by
economic uncertainty, they finally help him see who's to blame. They show him
the immigrants crowding in, using up jobs and benefits that were promised to
American workers. They show him minorities demanding handouts that are paid for
with his taxes, even as they riot, even as they kill each other and the police.
The show him terrorists making a mockery of weak American leadership. They show
him elitist liberals, professors and entertainers, disdaining his values and
mocking his religion.
And
it is such a relief, to finally put a face to all the ambient dread, to have
some clarity again, to know who the good guys and bad guys are. Our gun owner
is a good guy, thankfully, from the kind of self-reliant stock that settled
this country. It seems like America's decline is a done deal, that the tide of
liberal rot is unstoppable. But the one place he knows he can draw the line is
at his door, on his private property, because he has a gun. He can defend his
own.
If
the minorities riot again, or immigrant criminals move in nearby, or terrorists
attack, or some wackjob goes on a shooting spree, or Obama comes for his guns
... well, that's what the guns are for. He's given up a lot, but he won't give
up his autonomy or the safety of his family. He'll defend that to the end.
To
our gun owner, another mass shooting is not an argument for getting rid of
guns. It's a confirmation of his every instinct, another sign of moral and
societal decay, another reason to arm himself and defend what he's got left and
in fact, increase his arsenal.
You
can tell him about Canada and Australia until you're blue in the face — the
lower rate of gun deaths, the hunting exemptions, the seemingly intact freedoms
that they have. You can cite high popular support for restrictions on gun and
ammunition sales. You can tell him that not every incremental tightening of
standards is a slippery slope that no one wants to confiscate his guns. And,
the vast majority of Americans support gun rights, they also want some more gun
controls for our national sanity.
But
you're just another self-righteous liberal on another self-righteous crusade,
too blind or stupid to see how governments always use people like you to disarm
their citizenry. You've taken enough: his taxes, his freedoms, and his culture.
He won't give you anything else or any more.
A
cherished myth of American politics (indeed, of democracy generally) is that
it's fundamentally about persuasion, the contest of ideas. But in a political
system already biased against action, in which members of both parties are
becoming more ideologically and even psychologically distant, persuasion on issues that activate tribal
identities is all but impossible.
Our
gun owner is not going to change his mind: everything gun control proponents
consider evidence for their side, he considers evidence for his. Those differences
run deeper than evidence. Opinions trump facts: Truth gives way to rumor, and
compromise is a dirty word.
Thanks for stopping .. now watch gun sales soar again ... the sky apparently is the limit.
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