A Few Other Reasons They'll Never Get Our Guns—From an Observer Uncomfortable with Gun-Worship

Steve Sailer has done a good job of explaining [1] the massive—yet unremarked—racial distortion of the gun issue in America.

It goes a long way to explaining the screaming matches on this issue.

But there's more.

Now, I personally consider myself to have strong pro-gun views. I own them. I am a member of the NRA.

But for God's sake, people—they're metal and wood contraptions that expel high-velocity bits of metal. You can kill deer, turkey, or the occasional intruder, assuming you can get to the gun that you probably don't wear in a holster on your person while watching TV, and probably don't keep loaded next to your bed because you have kids in the house. Truth be told, guns are fairly primitive little things, with technology that hasn't changed much for a few hundred years. The notion of an everyone-is-armed-all-the-time society sounds absurd to me. I get that a white farmer in Zimbabwe would see it differently, but hopefully we're not there yet.

Guns do kill people. Anytime a political slogan starts to sound like something out of 1984—coming from the left or right—I get uneasy.

I'm telling you, in a normal society, guns wouldn't be that big of a deal either way. Japan bans them, and nobody really cares. The Swiss practically command ownership of them, and nobody really cares. Of course, neither of these societies are the runaway trains of multiracial craziness that we are.

The place I could have most benefitted from the wearing of a sidearm was on the D Train in New York City, where that would have been illegal anyway. My solution was to move to the suburbs. In other words, if your society is so bad that you have to go about armed, more guns isn't the solution. A different society is.

The veneration of guns as religious objects—and the obsession over them to the point they're hoarded by the dozen—is just weird. So are those long, detailed and lusty gun discussions that right-wing men relish. None of whom have ever actually shot a dirty hippie. It screams "proxy issue for conservative whites to ventilate their frustration over all the other stuff they'd get fired from their jobs if they talked about."

On a side note, I am amused that nobody really seems to talk about whether the Second Amendment grants citizens a right to defend themselves against a rogue government: it's one of those paradoxes of freedom that can't really be discussed. The government looks silly if it admits there's such a right ("and in the event we go nuts, of course, be forewarned that we'll come to get you with the following weapons, so be ready... try a .50 caliber") and tyrannical if it denies there's such a right ("yes, the country was born from revolution, but that was the only legal one and nobody ever has the right to do that again... so just hand over that slingshot nice and slow.")

So how could such ferocity surround the issue in America?

For one, guns are a lonely victorious issue for conservatives. They've lost—or are losing—abortion, immigration, prayer in schools, taxes, spending, marijuana, pornography, regulation, gay marriage, tort reform, you name it. We're surrounded by crime-committing Hispanics of questionable citizenship, Christianity has been chased from most corners, and every third show on TV is now about how cool gay people are.

But the NRA has been a strong defender of the Second Amendment, scaring Congressmen left and right. The Supreme Court has affirmed an individual right to firearms. On a field of fallen conservative causes, guns remain standing. So it's almost as if Conservative America is saying, "You've got to be kidding, right? You're going to whip us soundly on every single issue, and now you want to take away the only success we've had for the past half-century?"

In short, guns are the conservatives' abortion. It's been won. For now.

Add to that the fact that we don't have to discuss race when defending guns, and the incentive to go rabid is even stronger.

And yes, back to race. I got my handgun after Hurricane Katrina. I imagined defending myself and my family against roving bands of looters in the event of some natural (or man-made) disaster. I didn't imagine most of them would be white.

I can assure you the same thought lurks in the back of many other minds.

So there you have it. Guns are seen as the "last stand", ideologically and literally. Pry those cold, dead fingers.