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.
