As a rhetorician, can I just say that calling sensible regulations on gun ownership "gun control" plays directly into the hands of reactionary gun culture? Calling concern with gun safety "gun control" appeals to unrealistic dreams of total safety on the left, while on the right "control" unproductively conjures the image of Big Brother and provokes gun nut paranoid fantasies. I must say that reactionary organizations like ALEC and the NRA have been much more sophisticated rhetorically for the most part: Notice how "Stand Your Ground" elicits precisely the "rugged individualist" fantasies from which gun manufacturers profit the most, fantasies that compensate threatened bearings of heteronormative often insistently white-racialized masculinity in an economically precarious, demographically diversifying historical moment. This profitable complementarity of the rhetoric of the gun lobby and the promotional imagery of gun manufacturers and distributors no doubt accounts for the reason that latter fund the former so lavishly even when majorities of the actual gun owners they serve support many of the sensible regulations these lobbies combat so ferociously -- certainly it is not their civil libertarian concern with a Constitution every Amendment of which beyond the Second they seem utterly indifferent to.
It is crucial to grasp that while the number of privately owned guns in this country is soon to exceed the number of citizens in it this is NOT because gun-ownership is so thoroughly normalized here as to be beyond regulation. As a matter of fact, individual gun ownership is going down not up in demographic after demographic. What is happening is that an ever more marginal population is building greater and greater arsenals, and that these arsenals are containing more or more militarized weapons with each passing year.
This is a public safety issue of the most obvious and urgent kind. Not only should we resist right-wing efforts -- and broadcast media complicity in such efforts -- to normalize what is in fact dangerous and unjustifiable gun hoarding and gun fetishization as if these are representative of some sort of quaint Americana, matters of "hunting" and "household protection" -- but we should focus instead on public health and safety issues, on a lethal epidemic of gun assisted suicide and domestic violence, and on the unquestionable connection of mass-shootings with murder-suicide. Let's see how successfully the NRA can push their agenda of protecting the profits of gun manufacturers above all else when it is exposed that this means nothing but ever increasing access to military arsenals for mentally distressed people.
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Suppose in an alternate universe Adam Lanza broke into one of the Koch brothers' meetings and murdered 27 members of the One Percent.
Would progressives use that as an excuse for calling for more gun control? Or would they instead hail him as a hero and a martyr for "social justice"?
I pull out of the Memory Hole the fact that people on the left have idolized sociopaths and murderers who have the blood of millions of children on their hands, like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and lately the Stalin wannabe, Che Guevara. In fact, Che's image showed up all over those Occupy derelict camps last year.
Why doesn't the left celebrate Lanza for his authenticity in the face of death and his rejection of the values of an oppressive bourgeois society, the way Norman Mailer celebrates the violent "existentialist" and "psychopath" in his famous essay, "The White Negro"? Because Lanza chose victims inconvenient for that purpose, perhaps?
Suppose in an alternate universe Adam Lanza broke into one of the Koch brothers' meetings and murdered 27 members of the One Percent. Would progressives use that as an excuse for calling for more gun control? Or would they instead hail him as a hero and a martyr for "social justice"?
The left isn't coming to cut off your shriveled white penis, Mr. "Plus," you big Minus. All the camps, the showers of bullets, the Knocks on the Door that suffuse your boring balding life of comparative privilege with imaginary threat and persecution are projections. Progressives are not you. Your vision of the left, like the fantasy of your prerogatives, sounds like something out of the fifties -- and even then it scarcely matched what most of the left was really about. Most in the US left condemned totalitarian dictatorship quite as vociferously as the right did, though the left tended less to try to use such condemnation and an excuse for curtailing civil liberties at home and shift budgetary priorities to fund ruinous mega-militarism instead of useful social programs like the right did and always does.
Why doesn't the left celebrate Lanza for his authenticity in the face of death and his rejection of the values of an oppressive bourgeois society, the way Norman Mailer celebrates the violent "existentialist" and "psychopath" in his famous essay, "The White Negro"? Because Lanza chose victims inconvenient for that purpose, perhaps?
Norman Mailer? His essay about the Beats? Wow, you "futurists" are so retro! I don't think anybody has the whole story on the latest mass school shooting, but it appears that Lanza's mommy was a gun-nut and Lanza himself distressed and suicidal. I'll leave patriarchal white-racist gun-nuts of the right like you to celebrate such needlessly distressed bearings of self and the harm they cause and express.
I would indeed be well pleased to celebrate a society that saw the signs of distress in the Lanza household and provided mental health care and social support to help that family with its problems so that its members could connect with their potential for a measure of real happiness, creative expressivity, and heroism in a world with many shared problems calling for address. I would also celebrate a polity that had the good sense to keep multiple ammunition clips and multi-gun arsenals out of private hands.
The evidence is in: houses with guns in them are houses in which the chances of death by accident or suicide skyrocket and in which even the chances of getting shot by an fatally intruder by an intruder rises. Domestic violence in which guns are involved are lethal, while without them they are far less likely to be. Nobody needs an assault rifle or multiple ammunition clips to hunt, banning the private ownership of such weapons harms a marginal minority of gun nuts who shouldn't have guns anyway. Anybody who enjoys shooting or collecting guns for sport or hobby should balance their pleasure in that activity with its objective public safety threat: shooting guns in authorized ranges which store the guns on premises, and collecting historical weapons that are rendered nonfunctional are reasonable compromises. Background checks for all gun purchase including online and gun-show purchases, making licensing contingent on taking a gun safety course, encouraging health officials to ask questions about gun ownership and placement in the house of patients who show signs of suicidal depression and anger management issues are all perfectly reasonable regulations backed by multiple studies to deal with questions of gun violence. People like "futurists" who claim to respect empirical findings don't get to pick and choose the results that count. (Of course, if futurists really cared about consensus science they wouldn't sign up for cryonics or pretend that warp drives or Drexlerian nanobots were on the horizon either -- and then they wouldn't have a hell of a lot to say now would they?)
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