Wayne LaPierre is tainting everyone who belongs to the National Rifle Association as some kind of bedwetter. Growing up in my insular little Ivy League town, I almost never saw a gun. One exception was the father of one of my closest friends in elementary school. He had a large gun collection, but he kept it well locked up and I never got to handle one of his guns. The first gun I ever held in my hand was in a friend of a friend’s apartment in Los Angeles when I was 19 years old. I am the first to admit that I don’t know gun culture.
Still, I would see NRA bumper stickers on cars and trucks, and the people driving those cars and trucks usually seemed kind of badass. They tended to be manly men with beards and mustaches who wore workman’s clothes and carried a faint air of aggression. Everything about them warned you not to fuck with them.
Thus, in my young mind an opinion formed of NRA members as tough guys and outdoorsmen who are self-sufficient and afraid of no one. It’s not a disrespectful stereotype, although it isn’t entirely complimentary either.
But the portrait painted by Wayne LaPierre is entirely different. His portrait is of people who are scared of everyone and every thing. They are terrified that they be killed by al-Qaeda. They are fearful of Latino gangs and Latino immigration. They are afraid of natural catastrophes and economic collapse, and fret that those things may bring riots, looting, lawlessness, and chaos. They own guns because they expect civilization to collapse, and they are terrified that the federal government will take their guns away and leave them helpless when the apocalypse arrives.
I understand that there is a paranoid current in our under-culture that is represented by the militia movement and some cults and the white supremacy movement, but I never considered them to be the mainstream of the NRA.
Maybe scaring the piss out of people is good for gun sales, but this isn’t a good image for the gun lobby. If their membership is as paranoid as Wayne LaPierre suggests, they probably should be considered borderline mentally ill. Nothing makes people more uncomfortable than a heavily-armed man who can’t stop spouting off about the imminent breakdown of civilization and the menace of Latino drug gangs. That’s a massacre waiting to happen. If not a massacre, a murder/suicide certainly isn’t out of the question.
If I were an NRA member, I’d be ashamed of Wayne LaPierre. I wouldn’t want to be associated with him. I’d take my sticker off my car.
Your headline wins the Internet.
What Tien said. We need to make this exact question go viral.
Exce]pt I would put the word “Why” in front. Let’s make the assumption they are first. Never ask a question that can be answered with one word. Specially if the word is no.
Yes!
I took your idea for my comment when I shared to FB.
I am not trying to insult NRA members. I am insulting Wayne LaPierre.
Well, yeah. You’re basically saying the NRA members of your youth were John Wayne. That’s no insult. On the other hand, anyone who feels like he desperately needs an assault rifle with a 100 round clip to survive in this world deserves to be insulted.
Then the question should be “Does Wayne LaPierre think all NRA members are bedwetters?”
The fact is that until NRA members vocally denounce this guy, they should be assumed to agree with him. Many don’t, at least per the polling. So let’s have some stand up and say so.
I am promoting this via facebook, and people are sharing like mad.
I’m gonna show my age. When I was a kid I went to summer camp where there was a rifle range and skeet shooting. The NRA gave out little badges for different skill levels. We were taught how to responsibly handle a gun, how to master it, how to breathe easily and hold our preteen bodies steady to aim. We learned how to look out for the others on the range. We learned how to clean a gun and store it. How to pick up shell casings. What ever happened to that kind of NRA? Sure, I’m nostalgic. Someone needs to write the book of regarding the transformation of this organization from an educational one into the paranoid organization they now are.
That aspect of the NRA still exists. I wish some large group of NRA members would break away and focus on that plus support sane gun regulations.
Agreed. They either need a revolt from within, or a huge exodus to form a new organization that is sane.
I did that in High School. I got up to Marksman 2nd class. My gun was very old. My friends in Rifle Club would laugh at me because my rifle used to shoot fire out of the barrel. The sights were off, and I could not fix them – I had to aim at 4:30 1 in from target to hit it.
The NRA went from responsible to candy ass coward in 1977. Another issue that has come up is the degree to which the NRA has been promoting jailing huge numbers of Americans.
They want a dangerous society, and they want the rest of us to pay for their addiction to dangerous sex toys.
Gosh you think? That’s just good ole Madison Avenue psychological engineering.
It’s also a vicious cycle. Everybody has guns so I need a gun. Submachine guns are everywhere so I need one to protect the kids. What’s brilliant about the sense of “security” that the gun industry is peddling is that it never has to actually work. Not psychologically, and certainly not in terms of lowered body counts (just the opposite in fact!) When you buy a gun and you are now carrying and always in “tactical” mode, you probably don’t feel much safer. I would guess you feel significantly less safe. But that’s fine, you’re now all in on the gun as your only hope.
So that’s one part of the NRA. Then you have the hunters and rifleman whose cultural sympathies get exploited or who don’t have the independence of mind to question the extremist rhetoric of the NRA, who are always careful to conflate sensible gun control with “inevitable” confiscation.
The most interesting perversion of this is how guns get sold as somehow disruptive to the powers that be, some kind of defense against tyranny.
The pervasive sense, particularly in rightwing groups, that the future is necessarily apocalyptic (with the consequent total atomization of individuals or family groups), is a very interesting symptom of late stage capitalism. There’s some interesting theory out there about how capitalism has constructed a mental space such that no alternative is thinkable except total social collapse. Or rather, total social collapse is the necessary outcome of a capitalist system that can only be conceived as an absolute given.
Gun ownership produces libertarian thinking. You buy a gun. Someone asks you “Why did you buy a gun?” Now, you are not going to say “Because I get a deep and total sexual ZING out of shooting.” That would label you a pervert. Instead, you say “I live in a dangerous area”. Every time you have to justify owning a gun, you become more libertarian.
Guns make you think like a gun owner. It’s not the other way around.
This is nonsense. I have a gun, and I do not think like that at all.
I bought said gun to go to the range on my own time and clean it on my own time. Because at that point in my life I had to qualify with a gun, and I practiced on my own time. I am not in a dangerous area and my safety is not at risk. I still have the gun because it’s part of the various items I’ve kept around from my time in the military. I don’t own any ammunition for it.
Furthermore I don’t need the gun, anymore than I don’t need my old uniforms, ribbons, award plaques, or any of that. It’s locked up in a safe.
How is that libertarian?
A gun owner friend of mine told me today at break that he called Sierra Bullets (I think that was the name) to buy some, well, bullets. He reloads ammunition. The sales rep said there were running full overtime and are backlogged five months.
In the same vein, look at this stock chart of Sturm Ruger: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=RGR&t=5y&l=on&z=l&q=l&p=&a=&c=
All the local Wal-Marts, Cabella’s and the like are rationing sales because they are off the wall. I notice that these anecdotes have increased since Bloomberg’s PAC started their round the clock attack on Debbie Halvorsen (candidate for Jesse Jackson Jr.’s seat) and the NRA. The more Liberals push gun laws, the more money the gun and ammunition companies make.
I grew up with a father who held a masters in engineering and a Harvard MBA, my mother was similarly educated (though she’s a statistician). Our family friends were all fairly well off (all of which would be defined in current terms as between the 1% and .1%) and fairly well educated. Almost all of them, owned a gun. Some of them owned several guns, and some of them owned fully automatic weapons that were in no way legal.
Here’s the rub though, all of them were war veterans. Either WW2 or Korea in most cases, with a scattering of their kids having served in Vietnam. The most outrageous guns were brought home from the war and I’m fairly sure they didn’t have ammunition for them, war trophies really. The other guns were side arms or long rifles, military style again (though military guns from that era look nothing like they do now). With a smattering of shotguns and hunting rifles.
Nobody ever made a big deal about it or cared. It was just a thing they had. They’d been in a war and thus they had guns. I grew up with the impression that guns were something old war vets just had sitting around, no different really from uniforms and other stuff. They were there and while certainly deadly the only reason any of them had these objects is that a past job in a past life had given them these artifacts of it and that was that. The non veterans in our social circles didn’t have them.
It’s also worth noting, none of them were NRA members or ever talked about the government taking away their guns. We learned to shoot fairly early out of a “this is a gun, and it’s dangerous, and this is what it does, now you can stop wondering about it. If you want to shoot a gun just ask and we’ll go out in the woods and shoot”. Once my initial curriousity was satisfied, I quit caring about their existence.
That sums up most of the gun owners I know now. I was in the military and as such I bought a Beretta 92fs. It’s a nice semi automatic pistol. Rugged, reliable, fun to shoot and clean. It’s known in the military as the M9 and is the standard side arm for our service members, has been since the 1980’s. I bought one so I could practice on the range on my own time. I don’t own any ammunition for it and it’s in a safe. I’m out of the military now and have no reason to really practice with it. To me, it’s just a relic of a past life, nothing more. No different than the uniforms I keep in a foot locker along with my dd214 and various papers. My friends who own guns are similar.
I sure as fuck don’t identify with the NRA. They’re a bunch of loonies and they sure as hell don’t represent me. I’m not really worried about crime, heck I don’t have any bullets so it’s not like I could defend my apartment with it even if I wanted to. I don’t think the government is going to take it from me, it’s never been something that’s crossed my mind. And I really don’t identify as a “gun person”. I’m a gun owner because at one point I was in the military and thus purchased a gun. That’s all there is to it, and all there will ever be to it.
You couldn’t be more “on target.” With each passing day Wayne LaPierre reveals himself to be exactly the kind of paranoid gun-fetishist who should NOT be trusted with a semi-automatic weapon. He kind of reminds me of the singer narrator in Steely Dan’s “Don’t take me alive.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw843AjJRLg
This has to be one of your best posts ever. Too funny, if the subject matter wasn’t so sobering and sad.
See, in badass training they teach you that guns are just tools. You are the weapon. If you only feel like a badass when you’re heavily armed, then you are not a badass.
OT: You’re missing the story. Reid doesn’t have 60 votes to confirm Hagel. If Hagel wants to be Secretary of Defense, he is going to personally have to twist the arms of some of his old buddies.
This is an absolute and total overreach of the filibuster. Reid had better call in McConnell and tell him “We have a vote, or we pull the nuclear option on you morons.”
To my eye, at least, LaPierre is a mirror-perfect representation of NRA members. It’s their own passion for their “harmless” little sex toys that identifies them as seriously deranged. They expect society to pay the price so they can hang onto their trivial little hobby, which they keep claiming is just about target shooting and hunting.
Even as these “sportsmen” are screaming that they will bring down the government if it takes away their assault weapons, there are still people in other countries who continue to take down deer with bows and arrows, and even run down the deer on foot and eventually wear them down and dispatch by hand. My grandfather had no problem bagging deer with a simple .22 rifle. He said anybody who couldn’t do the same had no right to own anything more dangerous than a squirt gun.
So yeah, the ones who are not the next crop of formerly “law abiding Americans” until they aren’t are bedwetters and paranoids, and their “concerns” are of no interest or importance to anyone but themselves. Why they get so much attention is beyond me — well, not really: it’s spelled with a $.
PS — I’ve wondered for some time: is there concealed/open carry at NRA meetings and events?