The Gun Pedant

The bump-stock ruling occasioned me a brief social media dialogue with a gun pedant today.
 
This is a weird sort of guy with a weird sort of rhetoric.  I get the fetishization of hobbies.  You have the crafters, the motorheads, the bicyclists, the videogame dorks, the foodies, etc., etc.  They all get really into something and know all its ins and outs.
 
But guns are different because they are lethal - literally designed to kill.  Their ultimate purpose is war, or to stop personal violent crime.  Or to commit crime. 
 
Many books have been written about the messy psychological valley that has grown over the past century between sport and war.  The NRA’s transformation in that time from an enthusiast organization to one emphasizing violent threats not only from crime but from some future totalitarian government.  (In a bizarre twist, their zealousness has molded literally any gun regulations as primo fascia evidence of totalitarianism – for which more and more powerful guns are needed to defend from the state.
 
Fear is loaded right into the clip.  As a string of progressive civil rights triumphs on race, gender equality and sexuality played out over the years, gun culture shifted further and further from hunting and target practice and towards personal protection.  It’s hard not to draw parallel tracts between the legal and social deconstruction of white male, Christian, heterosexual patriarchy and it’s declining assumed superiority, and the rise of a gun culture in which there are more guns than people in the United States
 
The gun is the ultimate fascist signifier.  It is the monopoly on violence allowed to the state by democracy placed in an individual’s hands.  When empathy has failed, when communication has broken down, when you feel your enemy has you and your family in the crosshairs, violence becomes reasonable.  After decades of losing the “culture wars” (aka respect for pluralism and human rights), the gun has become a totem of this New Lost Cause.  In the 1970’s, mostly weirdos with vigilante fantasies subscribed to guns and ammo and studied diagrams of how to booby trap your front porch.  I recently watched Taxi Driver, and the Travis Bickle character couldn’t portray better the peculiar lump of roiling insecurities that is the modern gun fetishist.  Yet his character was a lonely Taxi driver living in the slums of NYC, eating popcorn at pornos and crafting DIY concealed gun contraptions before arguing with ghosts in the mirror. 
 
The modern 2nd amendment warrior is the face of the GOP, gathers by the thousands in megachurches, votes for a speaker of the house who flies the Appeal to Heaven flag outside his office and wears the face of an ex-con grifter conspiracist ex-president on his T-shirt while watching a slew of right-wing news porn peddling lies about violent immigrants, vaccine denialism, election-rigging, and trans-groomers hunting down children.
 
But there is something deep in that psychology.  When an appeal to tradition supplants academic, scientific, and a simple, empathetic listening to other people’s stories about their real lives, your epistemology is severely neutered.  A complicated re-routing system gets built that is designed to alleviate the cognitive dissonance between reality and your ancient assumptions.  When biblical inerrancy faces the staggering evidence of evolution, or the fact that when you meet gay people they are perfectly normal, the machine must go into overdrive.  When nearly every last scientific expert on the planet describes how climate change works and predicts massive storms, and your city floods.  When they describe how germ theory works and that you should wear a mask and you see the bodies piling up in make-shift morgues outside hospitals, doctors breaking down in tears, and a million of your countrymen dead.  When all crime statistics show the illegal aliens you fear so much actually have dramatically lower rates than US citizens and when you meet them they are normal, hard-working people whose first thought is their family.  When 60 cases of election interference are brought before the courts and all are thrown out.  When cities are not flaming hellholes but generally pleasant places most Americans live in happily.  It goes on and on. 
 
What is it like to live with a constant media and cultural diet of fear and paranoia, but then to have to always be working against the tide of reality to make everything align.  It’s got to be exhausting.
 
And now you’ve got some egg-head leftie who wouldn’t know a Coltrane X950 from a Weenus-Corrector 600.  This is YOUR turf.  You’ve trained for this.  You’ve got him in your sights. Dead to rights.  Let him try and take it.
 
Oh, he has arguments.  The senseless urban violence.  (Well, we all know who those people are).  The suicide rates.  (Not my fault if you’re a weak-willed nervous-nelly).  The endless stream of mass shootings.  (Not if everyone was armed).  The dead little kids, limbs blown off at Sandy Hook.  (The sanctity of life is… wait, did you say little kids?)
 
OK, tactical retreat.  Code red.  Does not compute.
 
A guy kills scores from a window over-looking a Las Vegas country concert.
 
The Pedant finds his stride.  See, what these pinko types don’t understand about guns is, well, everything.  They’ve come to my house.  Oh, it’s on.
 
I never finished a Tom Clancy novel, although I’ve enjoyed the silly action movies they spawned.  But I remember opening a copy of one once and was intrigued by the way in which Clancy went into great military detail.  If I remember correctly, there would be a chunk of dialogue between two characters, and then one would start to describe – in minute detail – the various types of tanks, their combat suitability, their equipment, their make and model numbers.
 
Now, I realize the Clancy audience is really into this stuff.  There’s a whole thing with war history buffs and almost cosplay devotion to the genre.  Maps and lists and coffee table panzers.  Miniature models meticulously painted and placed in little dioramas of sand and faux-scrub brush.
 
And these were real weapons of war, used by real soldiers who fought and died and did unspeakable things to one another.
 
Is there not some thread here, some deep sinew in the male psyche that weaves together notions of God, country, family and the implements of war?  When empathy is gone, when communication has broken down, you have your oily lists that only you and your kind really understand.  Really appreciate.  Because this isn’t just a hobby anymore but an identity.  You, Pedant, are naked here in this place of machinery and technical details.  Like the Ur man standing before his cave, the big bear before you behind the flames, your woman and child hiding behind you.  Your loincloth is the pages of True Crime and Handgun Magazine, tied together with tank treads only used on Dewy-Nukem half-tracks from 52’-53’ and the frames of Aviator glasses that remind you of being up in the clouds somewhere drinking beer in a Cessna-Sable B92.  Your club is a large bundle of Rush Limbaugh’s Signature Series cigars.  And the bear is, well, everyone who isn’t just like you.  Everyone who isn’t a real American.  Who isn’t real.

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