12.17.12
The WhiteManistan routine
Today starts with Ted Nugent because he is so emblematic of the twin problem of WhiteManistan and the gun lobby. In his many public statements and columns Nugent has never shown even the slightest basic human decency. And this weekend was no exception.
Nugent showed no believable sorrow over the Newtown massacre in an interview for the crazy right wing website, Newsmax. He just went off, with his usual horrible inappropriateness, delivering the gun lobby script that more people need to be armed to defend themselves when the shooter arrives.
Indisputable statistics show clearly that gun free zones around the globe are always where the most innocent human lives are slaughtered,??? insists Nugent, who is on the board of the National Rifle Association.
“The document [sic] genocide in Rwanda, Sudan, Germany, Norway, Scotland, England, Canada, North and South Korea and elsewhere prove them wrong again and concludes that people everywhere forced into unarmed helplessness will always be victims of violent crime.???
In the rest of the bit — you can check, if you wish — Nugent essentially suggests schools now be protected with an armed platoon composed of teachers trained to repel attacks. It’s beyond nauseating, an insane recommendation showing a board member of the gun lobby who has no interest in retaining a civil society and zero compassion for anyone in the massacre.
I could dissect the weird insinuation that mass gun ownership could have stopped “genocide” in a number of countries. England? Canada?
Where does he get these?
But Nugent has no grasp at all of the history of how Hitler seized power in Weimar Germany prior to World War II. To argue with someone who thinks that all that was needed was for Germans to have lots of guns is the same as taking up a discussion with a wooden table.
However, this is the story that is coming out of WhiteManistan. For way too long average people have declined to look at, or consider even slightly how we have come to accept as normal, logical and legitimate the paranoid manias concerning weapons ownership and civil rights which simmer in the juices of tribe of extremist GOP right/gun nut.
Mr. Chauncey Devega at We Are Respectable Negroes describes it thusly:
Apparently, if the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary had an M-4 assault rifle the massacre in her school would have been prevented. Today, an Indiana man was caught with 47 guns in his home and was in the midst of preparing for his own murder rampage at a nearby school. An Oklahoma high school student was planning his own murder rampage and was apprehended on the same day as the Newtown massacre.
The gun is a fetish object. It is also a tool that can be used for good or evil. It has freed countries. The gun has killed dictators. The gun has allowed small numbers of people to control many more than their number on the plantation, in the coal mine, in the sweatshop, or the forced labor camp. The gun allowed one man to kill 20 children and 6 adults in Sandy Hook Elementary School. The gun, in the hands of a teacher or a child in that same circumstance, would have offered no guarantee of their survival.
In his dreams of Call of Duty and other cartoonish video game violence, Texas Representative Louie Gohmert imposes his post hoc counter-factual onto the shooting massacre in Sandy Hook. To him, if more folks had the capacity to effortlessly shoot and kill like a character out of either a bad 1980s action movie, or a John Ford western, then Adam Lanza would have been stopped cold in his tracks.
Devega then goes on to deliver some unpleasant statistics taken from wartime gun battles. And if you read the rest of Devega’s posts he makes the point that “America has an angry white man problem,” one that’s been obvious for a good long time.
On Sunday I wrote the gun lobby, in being part of the DNA of GOP extremism, can be beaten because its numbers — like those of the Republican Party — are in decline. This is partly masked by the staggering number of guns owned in the US, a situation even more distorted by the fact that it is only a distinct minority that is stockpiling arms.
From the New Yorker, over the weekend, on a riff similar to Sunday’s post:
If you want to understand why the gun debate can occasionally feel rigged, this is the answer: the issue is characterized by a conspicuous asymmetry of fervor. The N.R.A. has only four million members—a number that is probably dwarfed by the segment of the U.S. population that feels uneasy about the unbridled proliferation of firearms. But the pro-gun constituency is ardent and organized, while the gun control crowd is diffuse and easily distracted. In the 2012 election cycle, N.R.A. spending on lobbying outranked spending by gun control groups by a factor of ten to one.
What that means in practice is that in the aftermath of contemporary gun tragedies, we don’t see new gun legislation. What we do see is a spike in gun sales. After the shooting last summer in Aurora, Colorado, gun sales went up. After the Giffords shooting, there was a surge in purchases of the very Glock semiautomatic that wounded her. Certainly, the firearm industry and lobby will confront some bad P.R. in the coming weeks, but they can likely find succor in an uptick in business.
And, indeed, this has already happened. Seemingly even before all the blood was dry, white people were rushing to gun stores, as indicated in news stories here and here. (Here’s the astonishing daily collection.)
All for the deadening usual reasons: Barack Obama is coming to take their guns. And, even more laughably, out of fear, the idea being, one supposes, that they will accompany their tots to school today with a couple sidearms under the winter wear, perhaps to stand guard on watch for the next Adam Lanza, ready to fill him with lead.
The ludicrous, but profoundly depressing image, is of white parents making up Ted Nugent’s armed elementary school defense platoons, signaling the complete failure of American society.
Here’s a Texas man, buying new guns to protect his children:
“I’ve got two girls, and actually, I’ve got a five-year-old. So, it really hit home with the age ranges of these kids, and it really haunts me …
“I’m always going to check it at hospitals, banks, schools … I have respect for the fact that, if a friend doesn’t want me carrying it in his house, I won’t carry it. I’ll check it at the door. I’ll of course give my spiel to a friend, but anywhere that law forbids it, I don’t carry.”
“Yesterday was the biggest day we’ve seen in 20 years,??? reads this bit from San Diego NBC, proffered by “Karl Durkheimer, owner of Northwest Armory said Sunday.”
“Today will probably eclipse that,??? he added.
If you dwell too long on the bleak absurdity encapsulated in these beliefs your brain begins to evaporate. Here are white people, stockpiling arms because they say now they are afraid of an Adam Lanza in their neighborhood, who got his AR-15 and ammo from his white mother, who stockpiled arms.
No one I know rushed out to buy guns over the weekend.
This is a response of only a certain segment of US society, one that is not representative of the whole any longer.
But the only way to make change is for someone with the national stage to make the arguments and keep them on the front burner. The President has that power.
He could be a do-nothing as is often his wont. Or he could actually back up the words he delivered Sunday. And that will mean getting after the National Rife Association.
Additional notes: This year Ted Nugent got a famously publicized visit from the US Secret Service after a speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. The Secret Service visits people who they have reason to believe may harbor a desire to shoot the president or be inciting others to do so. And even if the person interrogated is not charged, the visit is not a pat on the back for good behavior.
Ted Nugent, however, is still a board member of the National Rifle Association. Which indicates to reasonable people that the NRA doesn’t care if its leaders and members run afoul of the US Secret Service because of flirtation with language indicating they might like to, well, see the non-white guy in the White House be shot. (And he hasn’t even done his complete WaTimes column this week yet.)
This is ugly stuff and it is possible to tar the NRA with it. Because it is so ugly, WhiteManistan won’t have it. Expect more paranoia.
This morning a reader also noted that Adam Lanza’s mother had been identified as a “prepper” by The Independent, an English newspaper. That piece is here.
The information is brief and still preliminary. However, if it holds it opens a similar but separate and equally troubling can of worms.
Preppers — from the archives.
From a South Carolina newspaper today:
The Herald, a South Carolina newspaper, is facing ridicule and scorn and a barrage of Twitter messages, after it, rather stupidly, allowed a huge three-quarter page advertisement, touting its gun sale offering Christmas discounts on Smith & Wesson assault guns, replete with an image of a laughing Santa Claus, to be placed next to a story of the horrendous school shooting.
The advertisement for a pre-Christmas sale of a variety of weapons, that included handguns and assault rifles, at Nichols Store occupied prominent place on the fifth page of The Herald of Rock Hill, making it hard to accept the editor’ s contention that it was unintentional and unplanned.
“There are many newspapers in the US, that, as matter of principle and business policies do not carry classified ads for gun sales, inspite of being roundly berated by the gun-lobby and gun-owners,” it adds.