12.18.12
Hot manias from WhiteManistan
Like it or not, the Newtown massacre has exposed (in a very horrid context) one of this country’s more astonishing and frankly nauseating fetishes — getting hard over assault rifles if you’re white. And it’s not all white people, not anyone I know, and I’m pretty pale.
But in the last couple of years, [Newtown] residents began noticing loud, repeated gunfire, and even explosions, coming from new places …
Yet recent efforts by the police chief and other town leaders to gain some control over the shooting and the weaponry turned into a tumultuous civic fight, with traditional hunters and discreet gun owners opposed by assault weapon enthusiasts …
“Something needs to be done,??? said Joel T. Faxon, a hunter and a member of the town’s police commission, who championed the shooting restrictions. “These are not normal guns, that people need. These are guns for an arsenal …”
“It was like this continuous, rapid fire,??? said Amy Habboush [of the sound emanating from a private unregulated outdoor firing range], who was accustomed to the sound of gunfire but became alarmed last year when she heard what sounded like machine guns, though she did not complain to the police …
Mr. Faxon, the police commission member, who is a lawyer, said he wrote [a] new ordinance, which would have imposed additional constraints on shooting, including limited hours, and a requirement that any target shooting range, and the firearms that would be used there, be approved by the chief of police to make sure they were safe. This was no liberal putsch …
A modest proposal to curb the gunfire failed.
Anyway, “liberal putsch” is what I’d call an unfortunate choice of words by a writer striving to be interesting and colorful.
Hitler, who was not a liberal, or even remotely like anyone in Newtown, installed a machine gun in the Munich Bier Hall to control and intimidate an assembled crowd in the famous event from pre-World War II history that popularized the word ‘putsch.’ The next morning Hitler and his paramilitary force marched out to try and take Munich. Twenty people were killed in the skirmish that ensued, 16 of them Nazis. Hitler was sent to prison where he wrote Mein Kampf.
The Times piece also mentioned the enthusiasm for using semi-automatic assault guns to blow up propane tanks and Tannerite-packed targets at private gun ranges. It’s a sporting activity almost unavoidable if you’ve been paying attention the last few years. (A mind-rotting collection of homemade YouTube videos are here and here.)
Onward.
On the NRA, from Reuters, yesterday:
“One of great strengths of the NRA has been its bipartisanship,” said Jeremy Mayer, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “Now it’s almost all Republicans and it will be harder for the NRA to deal with a bunch of united and angry Democrats.”
It is expressed a bit too lightly.
The NRA, the leadership, if not the majority of its 4 million members, is a right wing extremist organization. It’s not rational.
I would imagine that most people who are not members have not actually read what its leaders have published in the past year.
Two columns, on the presidential election, are entirely motivated by a desire to frighten membership into contribution by describing a hidden Barack Obama conspiracy, one to be carried to its final nefarious end when he gained a second term.
This enemy-within conspiracy, with its roots said to be in the Justice Department and Operation Fast and Furious, is an across the board hidden operation, a treasonous collaboration with the UN to deprive Americans of their guns, put American gun manufacturers out of business through “a lawsuit [filed by the Mexican government] in a Mexican court against every U.S. firearm and ammunition manufacturer,” to have ammunition regulated by the EPA because it contains environmentally “toxic compounds,” and to make felons of everyone who owns a firearm.
This is the graphic used to illustrate one of the pieces. Do read the two at the links provided. They go right to the heart of a certain right wing white minority’s obsession with and coveting of heavy weapons.
It’s tin foil hat material, single-minded in the desire to instigate fear and paranoia.
The National Rifle Association is not a respectable or reasonable organization although many of its members (not its brain-trust) may be. And it is certainly not bipartisan in even a minor way. They’ve made themselves into ogres.
An Austin-area gun store owner is joining the gun rights debate with a controversial offer for teachers in light of the tragic shooting in Connecticut.
Crocket Keller of Keller’s Riverside Gun Store says if educators want to get a concealed handgun license, he’ll give them a discount. …
“We need to start thinking out of the box and deal with this violent culture,??? said Keller. “We need to lobby our various state governments to allow teachers to be armed.???
On gun sales, yesterday:
Customers fearful that assault rifles may soon be made illegal are buying now, before sales could be cut off.
We popped into 21st Century Firearms, a gun store in Bluffton.
President David Fillers says since Saturday, the shop has seen a huge uptick in sales of semi-automatic modern sporting rifles, handguns, ammunition, powder, primer, and even holsters.
Fillers says after he heard President Obama speak Sunday night of the need for changes in our approach to gun violence, he’s convinced a big battle could be brewing over possible bans to certain types of weapons.
He’s adamant that assault style rifles should not be outlawed.
” If you read the Federalist papers, our forefathers wanted to protect the same type of guns that our military had. They were concerned about tyranny, they were concerned about a government out of control,” Fillers said. — in Bluffton, Indiana
“You have other people say ‘My goodness, these schools can’t protect us, we’ve got to protect ourselves. We’ve got to buy guns.’ And you have other people who say, ‘They’re going to pass [tougher gun] legislation. I don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t have one. I’d better get mine now,'” says Hyatt.
Kay Duncan, the owner of Brass Balls Pawn Shop on South Main Street, said two customers who came in Friday said they were afraid of what President Barack Obama might try to do on gun control.
“That’s the first thing that came out of their mouths,??? she said.
She said the country has a lot of hunters who wouldn’t take kindly to the federal government trying to take their guns away.
“I just don’t think it would be wise for any gun law changes to be made,??? she said. “There are too many people who are armed. If you count the number of hunters who are licensed in each state, you have an army larger than our (U.S.) army.??? — Winston Salem
“We set a record for this store,” said Greg Burge, the owner of Beech Grove firearms as he straightened the inventory after a record number of buyers jammed the store this weekend. Many of those customers were buying in reaction to members of Congress calling for a renewal of the assault weapons ban. — Beech Grove, Indiana
Keep in mind that the president did zero on gun control in his first four years. But the NRA, and others, peddled this inaction as a hidden conspiracy in which, behind the scenes, coordinated forces in the Obama administration were moving to set the stage to take away America’s guns during his second term.
And now, with a massacre pointedly carried out with an assault rifle, a certain demographic of Americans — all in WhiteManistan — are rushing to buy even more, some of whom would probably say they are now utterly convinced that everything the right was saying about the president during the last four years on the Second Amendment was absolutely true.
They’ve made themselves into ogres (continued).
WhiteManistan is not all just Republican. It’s full of white libertarian kooks, too. Libertarians are right wingers who believe themselves too posh to be lumped in with run-of-the-mill GOP proles.
Here’s a take-the-cake piece in which libertarian Megan McArdle outdoes odious Ted Nugent for a day, recommending children (and everyone else) learn to rush shooters en masse when the gun fire starts.
Hat tip to Pine View Farm and Balloon Juice.