GUNS AND APOCALYPSE FEVER

This month's entry is courtesy of a valued friend and colleague writing under the moniker "Cincinnatus."  Previously published in Powerline, March 15.

I shoot a lot. A lot. Three times a week minimum, sometimes four, and if I’m lucky and time permits, five. That’s one of the benefits of retirement, besides granddaughters and late-- sometimes optional--awakening.

So my shooting range/gun shop is what sociologists would call my Third Place. It’s not home, where I’m a spouse and indifferent layabout, it’s not work, since I am 10 years beyond the horrors of office life; it’s the place where I’m me without any effort. They’re probably sick of me there but that’s OK because they do a good job of hiding it. The talk is always banter and needle and jest, all bonding courtesy of a sense of being a besieged community, and  general enthusiasm for the gizmos themselves. Needless to say, it’s as non-racist, non-classist, non-mysogenist as any place in America. 

But today it wasn’t my place. It was a hot mess.

People, people, people! Everybody is buying guns. It happens every time apocalypse fever fills the air, animated by crazed dreams of civil breakdown, anarchy, food shortage, the whimsy of life and death, and anyone’s aching need to protect children, spouse and self in that order. This time it’s COVID-19, but it could be any dodgy possibility as sustained and amplified by an ignorant media.

So as I sat there in the crowd, waiting for my turn to get to the firing line, I wondered: Who ARE these people?

They’re not conservatives. Conservatives already have their guns, many of them of the so-helpful AR and AK variant, and many boxes—and crates and pallets—of ammo. That’s because apocalyptic thinking is never far from the conservative mind, with its realthink about the evil the men do and how quickly they can do it. It wasn’t a liberal who said “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”

Some are certainly the low-informed indifferent, bludgeoned into fear by the media blackjack.  Some are the occasional shooter discovering himself low on ammo.  But certainly, some--maybe even most--are liberals.

They make me sick. You would think them at least capable of some honor on these issues.  They desire a certain world, one without the righteous force of self-protection, which they consider vulgar and immoral.  (Hard to tell which looms larger in their imagination!)  So here is an opportunity for them to live in that world and they say, No thanks.  Not me.  Him or her, but not me.  Which way to the .45 automatics?

These are people who would deny us any living creature’s fundamental right to self defense. These are a tribe that condemns righteous force as both vulgar and unnecessary. These are the creatures who want to look in our bedstand for the .45 auto with the light aboard. These are the lads whose ignorance is bliss when it comes to the things themselves, as if knowledge of the difference between a .308 and a .30-06 disqualifies one from the human race. These are the dweebs who want gun-owners listed in a public registry, like child molesters, of whom they consider gun-owners the moral and ontological equal.

I have a modest proposal for this annoying situation. The gun industry, especially at the retail level, should boycott THEM.  It is for their own good.  In my deep empathy for my fellow humans, though of the sub-special homo liberals, I wish to spare them the danger of an accident, the trauma of shooting a fellow sentient beings or even their own foot, the hypocrisy of not practicing what they screech. I feel those burdens are simply too heavy for their turbulent emotional state.

Thus I believe gun stores should be encouraged to sell only to select groups of those who can be trusted with the power of life and death. That would be NRA members or members of any other of the many pro-gun rights groups. Another group would be those who already have state issued gun-possession permits. Another would be known customers, those who’ve supported the places for years, not only with cash but with comradeship. Of course active-duty police and armed forces, or retirees, would be included as would sons and daughters of all of the above.

As for liberals, what do they do when S hits F, and bad dudes are smashing down the door to get at the food that was meant for Jimmy and Little Sally? Why, they can call the police.

What do you mean, there’s no answer?