Perverse Reality

The Perverse Reality Of Modern Gun Culture

By Oliver Willis

I will concede that the left has been on the losing side of the battle over guns for some time. The right is unified, as it often is, while Democrats are afraid of their own shadows on the issue. Even when polling supports a position, the side of extreme gun advocacy — the NRA — often wins, except in states like Maryland where they have little to no sway.

That doesn’t affect my personal beliefs on how we should limit guns, however. I don’t care if the initiatives I support have 1% support or 99% support, we should do everything we can to limit the amount of innocent people killed by guns.

The Constitution does in fact guarantee the right to bear arms. It doesn’t guarantee the right to every killing implement under the sun. When the Founders wrote the Second Amendment they did so in a world that couldn’t even envision a machine gun, let alone the weapons easily available today. They also wrote the amendment with the idea that the British could come and reclaim America at any moment. The idea that we need to arm ourselves against our own government is the worst sort of right wing paranoia.

Paranoia. As I discussed with conservative writer Jay Caruso, that paranoia is what motivates so much of the modern gun culture. Before Sandy Hook, President Obama and Congressional Democrats were not doing anything about guns. Democrats hadn’t done anything for almost 20 years on the issue. That didn’t stop the NRA from continually running fundraising drives and congressional campaigns with the idea that Democrats and liberals are at the vanguard of a United Nations plot to confiscate firearms. This isn’t something I just imagined, it is the actual NRA campaign materials and videos that communicate this message. And the NRA isn’t some offshoot gun group – they are the hub for gun issues in America, and have been for decades.

And as I mentioned on Twitter, simply flip through an issue of a gun magazine like Guns and Ammo, and the entire idea that at any minute the average gun owner needs to re-enact a scene from a Dirty Harry movie is drilled over and over again. The gun culture is all about protecting your home from mysterious, dark figures that are always a second away from attacking/raping you and your family.

It’s the sort of thing that was likely in George Zimmerman’s mind the night he murdered Trayvon Martin.
Never mind that crime has dropped, or that we don’t live in the Wild West. Even worse, if you have a gun in the home, you’re much more likely to shoot yourself or a family member, and not play out your own personal action movie.

Yes, other things can kill you – cars, household accidents, etc. — but unlike a gun, none of those things is designed to kill. A gun is.

And yes, criminals aren’t the people who often follow the rules, but we don’t abdicate our responsibility as a society to put rules in place because someone might break them. We’ve all gone over the speed limit while driving, but nobody with a brain uses that as a reason to dispense with speed limits.

Those are the sort of bewildering, asinine arguments the pro-gun movement has reduced itself to.

Guns are implements of killing, if we are to have them as part of our society — and yes, we have — we should do what we can to limit their capacity to kill the innocent while preserving a Constitutional right to possess them. If that steps on the toes of the conspiracy obsessed or a group of people who believe false statistics, oh well.