The Brown Badge Of Cowardice
Who better to explain a certain emergent trend toward naked insanity than Confederate Yankee?
I just dropped by my local pawn shop to get rid of some items around the house that were not longer needed, and found them to be extremely busy.
Because sure, that’s what most of us do when we have items that are no longer needed. We take them to a place that will loan us money with those items as collateral.
For instance, when my last car had outlasted its usefulness, I did the smart thing and took out an auto loan. Then a few weeks later, as I was still finishing the cases of beer I’d bought, the loan company provided free towing.
Actually, I think he’s fibbing in that characteristically childlike Confederate Yankee way of his. What really happened? We suspect that the now-accustomed wingnut welfare checks have narrowed in distribution, such that he had to liquidate some investment properties.
Unless he means ‘pwn shop,’ in which case, you know, here we are holding his items again.
The high level of traffic in the shop wasn’t all the surprising considering this economy Congressional Democrats engineered,
The vexatiousness of my breakfast wasn’t surprising considering the pot that Republicans had forgotten to put back in the coffee machine, soaking the countertop and denying me coffee until I could again put things aright. Also, The Warriors did it; they shot Cyrus. Tonight’s special report: When Snowball destroyed the windmill, was he aided by traitors within?
but what was surprising is why people were there. Other than myself, it doesn’t appear anyone was there to pawn unwanted things.
Of the 12 people in the shop when I was there, the 11 others were all looking at firearms. A CZ-58 and an AK-47 variant were on the counter in front of one pair of customers. An off-duty sheriff and his friend were picking up what I think was a DPMS LR-308 complete with scope and bipod. Another guy was looking at a used Polytech M-14, and the remainder were looking at handguns… mostly Glocks and CZ-75s.
I overheard one of the guys behind the gun counter say that gun sales among the shops in the area were up about 35-percent. Later, when he wasn’t as busy, I asked him why he thought that was. His answer was simple, and perhaps predictable.
“Barack.”
It’s worth noting that this post went up on Friday the 10th, while Barack Obama was in the very same metropolis of Asheville, North Carolina on Sunday the 5th. In other words, they’re starting a bit late if they want to kill Obama without embarking on some kind of interstate yee-haw convoy.
But then, that’s not what Mr. Yankee thinks he means — or what he wants you to think he thinks he means. This rush to buy guns, whether real or not, has become a conservative shibboleth lately, stemming from the avidly held prospect that an Obama administration would outlaw gun ownership, and the even more eagerly dreaded couch-time fantasy of a socioeconomic catastrophe that calls for the stockpiling of canned and dehydrated food and ammunition, the appointment of a ‘bug-out vehicle’ (in the imagined form, perhaps, of a suburban minivan with a jerry-built roof turret and spikes welded to the wheel hubs), and the merciless shooting of revenooers, bushy-haired and/or dusky-hued strangers, strangers in general except for attractive young women in distress, stray dogs and other previously non-huntable wildlife, and actual or potential thieves of canned and dehydrated food and ammunition.
The ongoing stock market crash has given a keen edge to this perennial daydream, this powerful intersection of the desires of the cod-Libertarian science-fiction fan and those of the cod-populist rural crank. When Confederate Yankee drops the name “Barack” at the end of his tale, it’s meant to invoke something that he, himself might not be able to explain in plain language, but that’s nevertheless pretty easy to understand for anyone who’s experienced the antics of the Confederate-Yankocracy since the mixed blessing of the Internet enabled them in media other than the micro-scrawled journal and the talk radio call-in line.
It signifies a return to the wingnut ethos of the Clinton years, before the conspiratorial, wackadoo right wing fell in love with George W. Bush, and thus with government power and weird neo-royalist notions of the Executive Branch. It’s a return to the “jackbooted government thugs” iconography of the ’90s, in which incidents such as Ruby Ridge and Waco were seen as defining a historical fault line between an illegitimate, runaway Federalism and a perpetually threatened organic America — the often agrarian, invariably pre-capitalist order imagined and extolled throughout the early 20th Century by characters from William Jennings Bryan to Father Coughlin, and later in even sillier fashion by conservatives from Pat Buchanan, to G. Gordon Liddy, to Rod Dreher. Armed militias, or at least groups of fat yo-yos with guns, sprang up to oppose a hallucinatory, originally Birch-concocted trend toward world government and to defend the sanctity of the Constitution — whose feckless shredding they would later, as we know, cheer, as soon as a spite-lofted pseudoconservative administration again controlled the White House.
In brief and to sum up, an Obama presidency will yield us a bounty of delicious 180-degree reversals, hanging contradictions, forehead-smacking discontinuities, and flaming self-pwnages from our wingnut pals, as their entire political edifice turns heliotropically to face the warming light of the new Hated Thing. Their doings of the past eight years will seem, to them although not to ourselves, like fragments from a dream. They will charge the George W. Bush presidency with a Reaganlike aura of indistinct, dumb uplift and nonspecific moral rectitude. And they will struggle to recapture those great days of America, always so intrinsic but so sadly vanished, held always and each time just out of their grasp.
And most of all, they will fear the omnipresent, hovering hand of the Other, always trying to take away the dignity that is their rightful birthright as Americans — the dignity that their intrinsic, bone-deep, wizening fear, their spite-fueling fear, keeps them ever from breathing freely enough to know or enjoy.
“Barack!”
…Because the election won’t happen for weeks, and they’re already running out of clean drawers. As for Mr. Yankee, we thought of a bumper sticker the other day: “You can have my foot when you pry it from my cold, dead mouth.” We’re prepared to offer a deep discount on case lots.
Black President?!?!
What about my thinly disguised prejudice, irrational fears, and deep, deep sense of inadequacy?
This self esteem doesn’t inflate itself, ya know!
It is not longer all the surprising that Bob Owens is a fucking imbecile.
Oh, and how about “You can have my head when you pull it out of my pasty white ass”?
With a little luck they’ll all be so scared they’ll never leave the house and accidenally shoot themselves over a noise they heard outside.
You know, you have to marvel at the psychology of a man (and I guess judging by the comments, a lot of his readers) who sees an impending electoral defeat of historic proportions for his chosen party, and thinks that buying guns in the wake of it a completely natural and healthy impulse.
Unfortunately, the major ‘news’ media will assist them in this, because should Obama take power, the right wing / news media nexus will disappear the entire period of Bush Jr. rule.
There will be a history of Bill Clinton policies, some sort of hazy period which goes unmentioned & unrecalled, and then the Obama administration’s terrible policies which created a bunch of messes out of nothing.
It simply will not have happened. All policies and situations will have appeared into existence the moment Barack the Islamic Shock Hussein Hampton Carmichael Obama X is inaugurated in front of a Che Guevara mural.
I do believe that some years later, if Obama and the Democrats actually do what the population pressures them to do to fix some of the more egregious problems, it may be like right wingers still do regarding FDR — keep telling themselves and anyone who will listen that you see FDR actually made everything worse and had we kept following Hoover the Depression would have cleared up more quickly.
That’s all assuming that the new ultra-militia movements are seriously cracked down on by the administration, and not allowed to get close to actually physically eliminating Obama.
On another note, someone pointed out at Balloon Juice that maybe one reason for the gun purchases was, um, hunting season.
You are one superb writer, Gavin M. Just wanted to put it out there.
What Dr. Zen said. Nice.
Guys, really; take a step back for a second. Look, I know you all mean well, but what most of y’all don’t realize is: Barack is BLACK. And he has a weird sounding name. I mean, hello?
hey there hank, pretty busy today, yeah? what can I trade this somewhat used, tipped over bbq grill for?- gun wise, that is. how about one of those fancy semi-automatic toys sheriff jimmy is looking over.
A couple things: 1) Regarding the first point – in fairness to Mr. Yankee, you can just sell stuff at a pawnshop – you don’t necessarily have to “pawn” it. 2) The particular weapons CY is talking about have little utility for hunting, and in many cases would be illegal to hunt with (handguns, especially). So if we can take him at his word about what people were actually looking at, I doubt it had anything to do with hunting season.
But I think the overall point here is very well taken, if highly depressing.
Sean
The fact is thanks for, YET AGAIN, getting “Dueling Banjos” stuck in my head.
Spite® goes well with Cheetos™, or so I’ve heard.
Yep, they’re starting to retreat back into their bunkers. That’s OK by me – I’d much rather have them defending the Maginot Lines of Loonyland than exercising power in the real world.
Incidentally, William Jennings Bryan was no wingnut. It’s true that the man was afflicted with a bad case of religiosity along with plenty of other flaws, but his outlook was a world away from the bitter, paranoid mind-set of modern conservatives. And I don’t think you’d find a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist like Bryan drooling over firearms at the local pawnshop.
You can hunt with handguns.
In May, Gov. Ruth Ann Minner signed legislation permitting the use of large-framed, large-caliber handguns for deer hunting, making Delaware the 48th state to legalize handgun use for hunting, according to the National Rifle Association.
I like to read CY’s monkey-flingings in the voice of Dale from “King of the Hill.” Makes things more intelligible.
I’m sure more than one CY associate has dreamt of his own special “Day of the Jackass” wherein they take out the great revolutionary…Univ. of Chicago…law professor…who has defended conservative readings of “militia” in the 2nd amendment…oh who cares NI^%&r NI^$#R, NI$%^R IN THE WHITE HOUSE.
Yeah, in the good old days of hyping the antigovernment militias into the sort of environment which led to the Oklahoma federal building bombing, “jackbooted government thugs” usually still meant “white jackbooted government thugs”.
What will they call the “jackbooted government thugs” now that their minds are short-circuiting with flash-cut edited mental videos of angry negroes storming the suburbs as a giant Obama hologram towering hundreds of feet into the sky screams “kill the white man! Rage!”?
I dunno about “intelligible” but it sure does make me smile, Lou.
[…] I have one of those, madam? « The Brown Badge Of Cowardice […]
ABOVE: Our Aeschylus of Asheville
I live in the mountains just outside of Asheville and I don’t think that Con/Yank lives here. According to his blog he lives in Raleigh which is about a 4 hour drive from here.
I like to read CY’s monkey-flingings in the voice of Dale from “King of the Hill.” Makes things more intelligible.
“Guns don’t kill people – the government kills people!”
The high level of traffic in the shop wasn’t all the surprising considering this economy Congressional Democrats engineered,
He doesn’t know much about History. Nice try, though, Bob.
I overheard one of the guys behind the gun counter say that gun sales among the shops in the area were up about 35-percent.
First, I just don’t buy this one. Second, if it were “true”, there’s no statistical base for comparison. If a shop sells three guns a month, on average, then sells four guns one month, that’s a 33% increase but it’s not all that big an increase in actual gun sales.
Also, isn’t Owens a gun salesman of some sort? Or am I falling for an internets legend? (I don’t really pay close attention to the nimrod side of the blogosphere.)
One question I forgot to ask. How many pawn shops are there, “in the area”?
To add to what Snorghagen said about Bryan, he was a creationist not only because of his (admittedly simple) faith, but because he thought it lead to social Darwinism which was used by the rich to justify their wealth and as an excuse to look down on (and oppress) the working and middle classes.
As for Ruby Ridge, note how the wingers almost always blame it on Clinton (the CLENIS!!) even though it happened in 1992 when Bust* the First was President.
*”Bust” was a typo but I decided to keep it.
I IZ ALL UP IN UR (CHARCOLE) GRIL
Ya know, before we can behead guys like this, we’ll need to do exploratory colonoscopies.
Why is it that these RW bozos either have no chins (TIDOS Yankee) or too many (Pantload, etc).
On another note, someone pointed out at Balloon Juice that maybe one reason for the gun purchases was, um, hunting season.
The hand guns were for cheatin’ season, when hunting widows go out looking to pass the time…
You have to be a bit of a twit to sell things at a pawn shop anyway. They tend to offer less than half what the same items would get on Ebay, and then try to re-sell them at 3 times the amount.
They are mostly used by junkies who need to turn stolen goods into cash before they start rattling again.
But hey.. Inbred Yankee is obviously having the time of his life.. You can’t be a good paranoid survivalist nutjob without a raging persecution complex! And at last, with a nigra in the white house, he’s got an excuse to start digging that bunker!
What about the plight of unattractive young women in distress? Who will rescue them?
…or have I revealed my loony-lib nature with that question…
“Tanner this is Yankee! This whole town is infested with killer cockroaches. I repeat: KILLER COCKROACHES!”
Nevertheless, you gotta hand it to those Democrat guys. After so many years out of power and being totally marginalized by the Republicans, they still managed to pull off a STUNNING victory by totally tanking the world’s economy.
I believe I said this the last time the whole stupid wingnuts think they’re going to fight the power with guns, Wolverine-style, but they’re really stupid if they think they’re going going to fare off against the U.S. government with their shitty little civilian guns.
I mean, they’ve been gleeing for the past eight years about how the U.S. Army sandblasted Fallujah to the ground. They think the Army’s going to give a shit about blowing them to ash?
You fucking wingnuts *lost* Waco. Just like your forefathers *lost* the Civil War. As much as you talk it up as martyrdom, the non-traitors of this nation remember who fucking won in the end.
You’re reading this all wrong. First off, you’re definitely wrong about gun control. Just because BO and the rest of the Dems aren’t talking about it doesn’t mean that they’re not planning it. If Obama wins and Congress picks up more Democrat seats, then count on that Dream Team charging at a much, much stricter gun control package than the Clintons put into play. I don’t even own guns but I’m cringing at the prospect. And $5 says if that package goes through, the number of guns reported stolen will skyrocket and the actual count will plummet because owners will be burying their shit rather than turn them in.
On the flip side, there is a lot of concern (driven mainly by statements from Bill Maher and the like) that an Obama loss will lead to serious rioting and looting from coast to coast. You get someone like Maher saying that if BO loses, then who knows what will happen? That’s a very menacing insinuation. Are we suggesting a replay of the LA riots but on a national scale?
Gun ownership isn’t about compensation for anything, it’s not about “standing up to the guv’mint”, it’s not about white flight and fear of a black hat, or any of that shit. It’s about being prepared and having a tool that can keep an assailant at a distance and giving the person coming at you a moment’s pause while he or she rethinks that course of action. Call it paranoia if you want but it’s the truth, and it applies to any edge of the political spectrum (remember, Rosie O’Donnell wanted her bodyguard to be armed too).
Seems when a writer on commondreams.org called for a revolution called for a revolution:
“The other option, the one I have long prayed we would never need to even consider, is a total revolution. But, If Congress won’t act in its own self-defense, in the defense of democracy, in defense of us – the people who have elected them to protect us from this very danger – then what is left for us to do? I don’t want to see it come down to this, but I fear that it will. Put your party politics aside right now. We are in a crisis so dangerous that should these people succeed in their coup, your party affiliation will no longer matter, your American flag will be a nice collectible item of something that once was, and your version of God will be worshiped in secrecy because your freedoms will be owned by the few.”
Confederate Yankee was sounding the alarm:
“I can only hope the lawful authorities are monitoring such enticements towards insurrection with all due seriousness, and find a nice, well-lit and cheery cell for those who require one.”
Now that a man of colour might be elected president, the shit talks about buying guns.
Hi, concern troll!
To be clear, I’m saying a big Sadly, No! howdy to 23112 as a concern troll.
Bringing up Rosie O’Donnell, like we give a shit about what she decides to do?
Fuck you.
Gavin: What a beautifully written post. Thank you!
Don’t know what’s wrong with my html formatting, but the commondreams article is here:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/21-0
You know how in various wars, you get these people stranded in the jungle with no idea that the war has ended and they end up living there for like 10 or 15 years thinking the war is still going on? Isn’t there some way we can put a fake US Civil War on tv (Wag the Dog style) until all the CY’s of the world flee to the woods. We’ll rope off those areas, go about our business as usual, and leave them content to play Red Dawn in the Appalachian mountains for the rest of their days.
Its totally win-win as long as no one takes any canoe trips into CY’s “squeal like a big” zones.
err…pig, not big.
I got this from a guy serving life at the prison where I work, so take it with a shaker of salt. He traveled in circles where survivalists, real anti-government types (ones who won’t go near a camera,) self-sovereignty dudes, and others roamed. And he says he even shot at the same gun range with Tim McVeigh on a few occasions. Anyway, here it is:
“When your money looks like it won’t be worth shit, there are a few things that won’t ever lose value. One is gold, another is medicine and food, and the last one is guns. In fact a good Colt 45 tends to cost the same as an ounce of gold, and it’s been that way forever.”
I can see the logic in stocking up on those things right now.
“Why is it that these RW bozos either have no chins (TIDOS Yankee) or too many (Pantload, etc).”
Because do the math, is why. It evens and averages out. In Wingnuttia, chins are fungible.*
* Still have no idea what “fungible” means, but using it this way feels right
in my “gut.”
(Nice writin’, Gav.)
So the astounding increase in pawn-shop traffic wasn’t spurred by “this economy Congressional Democrats engineered” but, instead, by simple wingnut paranoia?
Thanks for clearing that up for us, Bob. Never would have guessed.
In fact a good Colt 45 tends to cost the same as an ounce of gold
Wow. The forty-ouncers have to be _ridiculous_!
CZ-75s? The Czechoslovak CZ-75s? Wow, I suddenly feel a surge in patriotism for my long disassembled homeland.
Also, Glock is based in Austria. Way to show YOUR patriotism, heartlanders.
I do believe that many wingnuts are going to vote for Ronald Reagan. Even I have to admit that his decomposing corpse might do a better job as president than Bush did.
Get your wingnut shirts here.
There’s only one shirt available on that site with a positive message about one of their living candidates. You can get a shirt saying “Vote for Sarah Palin.” The rest of the shirts express love for guns or hate for Democrats, liberals and hippies. Perhaps 36 years from now some clever bugger can convince the dimmest wingnut bulbs that he/she is the reincarnation of Reagan, and they can vote once again for their hero.
Do you think they’ll be self-aware enough to go through their archives and delete all the posts where they squealed in fear about George Bush NOT getting the power to do whatever the fuck he wants, “BECAUSE HE’S THE POTUS! That’s Why!”?
Prolly not.
Maybe if the Dodgers and Phillies put in an extra-inning marathon tonight, tomorrow we’ll wake to another gem from Gavin.
Good one.
Never done the pawnshop thing, so I might be confused on the dynamic. But doesn’t every gun in a pawnshop represent somebody having gotten rid of a gun? So couldn’t you argue that all of those guns available in Bob’s local pawnshop actually indicate a trend toward personal disarmament? Please enlighten me.
In brief and to sum up, an Obama presidency will yield us a bounty of delicious 180-degree reversals, hanging contradictions, forehead-smacking discontinuities, and flaming self-pwnages from our wingnut pals, as their entire political edifice turns heliotropically to face the warming light of the new Hated Thing.
… as their entire political edifice turns black helicopto-tropically to face the warming light of the new Hated Thing.
Frank Rich + Hefty dose of snark = Gavin.
Bravo!
Menacing indeed. Bill Maher’s mind control powers are legendary. He could easily transform millions of ordinary American citizens into brain-eating leftist zombies through sheer force of will and then use them to burn this country to the ground.
I’d say we’re pretty much doomed.
Another facet of this, I think, is the mounting hysteria about ACORN. They’re already preparing the Obama-is-illegitimate narrative that will be echoing through talk radio, Fox News, the wingnutosphere, etc. within moments of Obama’s victory, which at this point is looking like it will be a popular landslide at least. From there it will travel through Drudge, Howard Kurtz, and the other usual suspects into the mainstream, and Obama’s inauguration will probably be marred by “news” stories with titles like “Stolen Landslide?” and “The Chicago Machine Goes National.” These stories will be poorly sourced but nonetheless “balanced” in that they will give equal weight to both objective evidence and rankly partisan speculation, and the result will be a presidency hamstrung by a media that takes its marching orders from the likes of Michelle Malkin. The good news is that Obama seems to know something about how to fight back — and that progressive America seems to have learned a thing or two about the media from the Clinton years.
Bonus points for “spite-lofted”. Glorious.
CY’s little fable is full of win – just not quite in the way he thinks it is … y’know, life’s funny that way.
Wingnuts hastily arm themselves to the teeth.
Their motive is pure unadulterated paranoia.
Hysteria is in play as well.
Many (if not most) gun injuries & fatalities are self-inflicted.
As usual, The Darwin Factor triumphs yet again.
No, probably Czech CZ-75s; Czechozolvakia no longer exists and hasn’t since 1993. They’re nice guns – well balanced, reliable, and accurate – I love mine.
Glocks are also good guns, particularly for survival purposes. They’re very reliable and easy to clean, and have fairly high capacities (the standard magazines on a Glock-19, for example, are 15 rounds each).
And I’m planning on stocking up on a couple more guns and some ammo with the coming election, mostly because I suspect the crazy fucking right wingers are planning for an apocalypse.
D. Aristophanes – BRILLIANT
The “Shit Your Pants For McCain 08” strategy…strangely familiar.
I love this place. But where the hell was Sadly, No! when I really needed you? When I think of how things might have been, had I known of Sadly’ No! fifteen or twenty years ago…. Ah well, no use kvetching over spilled borscht. You’re here, I’m here, and we are together again for the first time. And I will always be yours, assuming you don’t mind.
Most pawnshops co-operate intimately with the local police to identify stolen objects. Computers make this job very pratical, too these days. If you’re talking fairly valuable objects with serial numbers, I would not suggest trying to pawn them, (which also requires full ID) if they are stolen.
It’s about being prepared and having a tool that can keep an assailant at a distance and giving the person coming at you a moment’s pause while he or she rethinks that course of action.
Cause that’s just how it works, every time, huh. Gun ownership is mostly about making up personal triumphalist fantasies, based on what you have seen on TV and movies. BTW, I’m pretty sure your “re-thinking” scenario is dead wrong. I thought if you pull a gun, you are ready to shoot it, and you don’t pull it til then. When is then? Oh, you’ll know. Gun assholes are the same whether they vote D or R. People who love guns love them more than any politician or politics. They always let you down. Guns, they never do.
Nice generalization, Mooser.
You got one about black people and dancing?
Your position is a load of crap, and if you think for a second instead of spouting propaganda and talking points like sarah palin you’ll have to acknowledge it is.
Sure, there are people just exactly like you describe. But spend some time on a range here and there and know what? You’re going to meet a wide cross section of people. Almost like it was a gym or a grocery store. Some are assholes, some have bloody minded fantasies, some are smart and responsible.
Firearms have been a major part of my life for forty years. Oddly, I don’t run around waving my guns or shooting kids or any of your other straw man behaviors. I know a lot of people who have and shoot guns, and oddly, NONE of those I choose to associate act like this drooling adolescent madman you describe.
How could that be? Could it be that very broad generalizations are ALWAYS wrong? Could it be that you might have to recognize that NOTHING is as simple and predictable as you describe? Could it be that the situation is, as it so often is, is more complex and nuanced then you want to believe?
It’s amazing how ideology can make smart people stupid.
And yeah, that’s true if they have a D or an R next to their name…
mikey
phleabo,
CZ-75 was introduced in 1975, so it’s Czechoslovak. Unless, of course, you’re Czech 🙂
not that I am doubting CY’s veracity, but don’t forget that his raison d’etre is to be able to list as many types of guns in one post as he can.
Yeah, generalizations are fine until it’s your sacred cow lined up at the slaughterhouse, eh mikey? Everybody realizes that generalizations don’t hold true in all cases, and we also all realize that ALL situations are more complex and nuanced than a short comment can convey. Your experience may be exceptional, but you don’t have to spend much time at a range or rubbing elbows with the camo types out here in hunting country to see that Mooser is basically correct.
The high level of traffic in the shop wasn’t all the surprising considering this economy Congressional Democrats engineered,
What I hate most of all about these clowns: to their dying day they’ll be pathological liars.
mikey:
Well then, how about this generalization.
The entire point of a gun is to kill something. There is no other reason for their existence. If you own a gun, you have made the decision that you, for all your assorted human flaws and stupidity, are qualified to kill something or someone.
If you should happen to actually use it, you will discover that you were completely wrong in your assessment as to your qualifications.
So in the meantime, you’re either dicking around with what you don’t understand, or you just don’t give a shit any longer.
Frankly, I’ll be more than happy to see a day when the deadliest weapon in American hands is a butter knife.
CZ-75s? The Czechoslovak CZ-75s? Wow, I suddenly feel a surge in patriotism for my long disassembled homeland.
Also, Glock is based in Austria. Way to show YOUR patriotism, heartlanders.
That’s funny. The cheap, popular stuff does usually come from Warsaw Pact or ChiCom armories. Betcha most of the yokels Bob goes shootin’ with have a Chinese SKS in their cabinet, and some version of a Makarov or Tokorev in their gun safe.
If I recall correctly some of the proprietors of this blog are weapon owners.
Shorter Zionist Nazi:
Why does this intelligent black man keep making me and my friends feel inadequate about our penises?
If I recall correctly some of the proprietors of this blog are weapon owners.
True. You live on a farm, you pretty much have to have a gun for varmints. There’s simply no way to “MacGyver” rabid dogs, 40 lb raccoons cleaning out your pecan trees, or 25 lb groundhogs decimating your soybeans and destroying the foundations of your house and barn.
Oh, I suppose I could lay out poison everywhere, and pretty much kill everything on four legs within a mile, but a gun’s more humane.
Am I the only one who’s initial thought was that if CY was visiting his “local pawn shop”, he should consider moving to a better neighborhood?
Maybe the gun browsers who were motivated by “Barack” plan on using their purchases to shoot themselves.
Y’know, gun ownership is one area where The Internet Changed My Mind, HTML’s examples being clear ones. Rural gun ownership makes practical sense.
IF YOU TAKE AWAY MY GUNS HOW WILL I DEFEND MYSELF AGAINST THOSE EVIL BEER BOTTLES, PAINT CANS, AND ROADSIGNS?!?
the horror.
The pawn shop owner was wrong and revealed his prejudice rather than enlightened the customer. Gun purchases have increased in preparation for more difficult times, not because of Barak or because assassins are suddenly coming out of the closet.
I’ve never actually been to a range to shoot. I prefer to go out into the desert. But I have been to a gun show- the folks there would make Mooser’s comment an understatement. Just sayin’.
Also, CY’s description of the scene in the gunshop is of several people talking to clerks with guns on the counter between them. But are the people buying or selling? If the economy takes a sufficient dive, expensive toys are the first thing to go.
Colt .45 = ounce of gold? Yeah, right.
Yeah, generalizations are fine until it’s your sacred cow lined up at the slaughterhouse, eh mikey?
I’m sorry. You have confused me. I said fairly clearly that generalizations are NOT fine. In fact, I was making the point that people of all ideologies seem to be willing to accept blatantly false generalizations as long as said generalizations coincide with their ideological worldview.
As such, your comment makes no sense to me. Can you explain what you meant?
mikey
Probably can’t, Mikey…after all, I’m apparently a troll. Thank Wonkette for that, by the way…she’s the one who dropped the link to this thread.
The survivalists are, however, ultimately correct. Our high standard of living arises from a surplus of consumption, which maintenance on such a large scale requires the destruction of the environment and exhaustion of its resources in just a few human generations.
As resources exhaust, the hillbillies, survivalists, and existing Stone Age peoples will remain about as badly off as they are today, while you and I face the collapse of our ways of life.
Hillbillies and Stone Age peoples have always been extremely socially conservative, because they know the limits of consumption imposed by their environments. They are not worldly or liberal, and cling tightly to beliefs that we would consider nonsense.
Our ideology of infinite growth and unsustainable consumption, likewise, is nonsense to them. Their nonsense will have the benefit of out-surviving ours.
As population grows on a finite planet, resources per capita must decline. As we exhaust easy resources and move on to hard resources, resources obtained per unit of work must decline.
Armed with these two obvious facts, we must not aspire that everyone in the world enjoy our high standard of living. If resources were distributed equally among six billion people, practically nobody would have electricity, a car, supermarket foods, or a lawn.
We should not say one thing and do another. If we want global justice, let’s see who is the first to donate property to a Native American from whose great-grandparents it was stolen. Let’s see who is the first to give up electricity, so that demand is lowered and its price drops within reach of someone poor.
When my job goes overseas I’ll have to sell my guns to pay the bills. Just sayin’
They’re rushing out to buy guns because they feel personally emasculated by Obama, and need their fake penises as tokens to ward off the imaginary threat of the penis withering up and falling right off.
I tend to be of the opinion that whatever you can’t kill with a .22 should probably be allowed to sue your ass if you try.
I disagree with the basic idea behind ‘home defense’ or whatever – hell, the kind of ‘self-defense’ you’d wind up doing with a rifle or shotgun is ethically dicey enough, and you can basically assume in a situation like that that the other guy has a bigger gun than you and has better training in its use – and as far as I’m concerned it’s just too damn impractical even in the suburbs to haul around a handgun. If I ever feel like I’m going to be compelled to defend myself, I’d strongly prefer either some kind of melee weapon or a good few months of ground-fighting training.
In general, it’s profitable to draw a distinction between legitimate gun-owners, people who probably shouldn’t own guns but are at least doing so for sane reasons, and people buying sawn-off shotguns to kill LA rioters. The latter category is where CY’s sympathies lie.
They buy guns because they’re not only convinced the world is Dangerous but people they run into on the streets are more likely than not to want them dead, especially if they’re urban. They think, because they’re members of a capitalist consumerist culture, that going out and spending $500 on a tool-toy will make them invincible. Actually defending anything with a firearm requires practice and discipline – something they’re constitutionally incapable of. They just figure as soon as they’ve got a Magnum in their hands they’re going to be an even bigger-dicked version of Dirty Harry.
These people kill innocent people, often their own family and friends and often children, with their negligent unctuousness. They’re the ones the NRA exists to protect – and they’re the only ones any gun law in the last half century have actually targeted.
Gun ownership should be restricted. We don’t let people drive after they’ve killed people behind the wheel, and cars have a lot more intrinsically innocent use than firearms. And all the horseshit about criminals getting guns any which way – yeah, because you’re fucking selling them to them! If it weren’t for the fucking American gun culture, gun shows, and illicit weapons sales – often a product of gun-wankers’ contempt for the law – a lot of people would be alive who aren’t. And for what? So some jackass can get a deadly weapon without the state knowing about it? Christ.
23112: Then perhaps you should quit making appeals to celebrity authority, like people at Sadly, No! give a flying fuck what Bill “I’m A Conceited Twat” Maher and Rosie O’Donnell say or do, or that invoking fear of what Obama is gonna do when he wins, or what the uppity Democrat supporters are gonna do if he loses.
Because it smells of troll.
Rick Astley: Yes, keep the poor down, or else you’ll all be poor. We’ve heard that before. Same with “either give up what you have, or you’re all hypocrites.” The only reason hillbillies will survive is because it’s simple to live in ignorance in a Dark Age.
Overall, your Rickroll sucks.
(a) Giving up electricity isn’t the answer. Producing public utilities at profit is the problem; a quasi-public corporation such as exists (or used to exist) for education and water is the only reasonable answer.
(b) Have you ever actually seen a rez? They’re breathtakingly horrible; making them bigger would solve nothing. The main problem is that Native Americans exist outside of the public radar and they endure hopeless lives predominated by grueling labor, cheap and dangerous intoxicants, and early death. Making grand sacrifice a precondition of putting them on the public agenda is as ridiculous as leaving slavery be until the taxpayers can be prevailed upon to spring for forty acres and a mule.
In general, M. Astley, while I appreciate the consciousness, the liberal essentializing of morality into individual behavior leads to inherently worthless answers to social problems. Society is warped and we can no more fix it with personal benevolence than Schindler could have ended the Holocaust.
Leon Trotsky: Keeping the poor down is not a proposal of mine. It is a description of what you and I have always done. You and I, right now, are keeping the poor down. That is how we can have electricity and supermarket foods and cars etc.
The English-speaking world, and America in particular, consumes far more than its share of resources. There is no way to grow the amount of resources, now that growth in fuel production has stopped. The only way for poor countries to get more resources is for them to stop shipping them to you and me.
If this were to happen, you and I would be poor. I don’t like this system any more than you, but I can’t make it go away with the power of imagination.
The Republicans are generally nasty and evil, yes, but the Democrats are even more spellbound by crazy beliefs in infinite resource consumption. The world really is finite, and we really are consuming more than our share, and we can’t just grow consumption until everyone has a fair share.
A fair share means less for you and me. For better and worse.
I tend to be of the opinion that whatever you can’t kill with a .22 should probably be allowed to sue your ass if you try.
I somewhat agree with this, but then I don’t live in an area in which I must cohabitate with what amounts to megafauna. If my shack were in Alaska or Colorado instead of Arkansas, I would have something at least 30.06 sized or better.
I love wildlife and I’m not a hunter — I applaud and support all efforts to conserve animals like grizzlies and mountain lions. But I also have the right to shoot them when they come in my yard, and, sorry, a .22 isn’t going to do the job.
As it is, the firearms on this place consist of a generic Hungarian bolt-action .22 necked-down to a .17, and (this will make Con-Yank and his friends drool) a German Walther .22 training rifle my grandfather took as a trophy from some Nazi fuckfaces in WW2. They’re tools; small-caliber, unsexy tools.
All that said, few things make me more nauseated than urban/suburban idiots like Yglesias and McArdle thinking they’re hot shit on a gun range, shooting clay pigeons with .20 gauges. Fuck them.
Look, I don’t know.
I don’t want to be a standard bearer for some kind of gun ownership platform.
I can really only speak for me.
I’ll admit that I have a bit of a tortured view of it all. I became wedded to guns on the cambodian border in 1970 when I had to take the lives of people that I might live. I did, and I did.
I’ve never, ever, been comfortable being unarmed since. Is that part of my experience, part of my sickness, or a rational reaction to the world at large? I have no fucking idea.
But I will tell you this. Guns are like religion and abortion. You don’t want one? Fine. Don’t buy one. I don’t honestly care one way or another what you think. I’ll be armed, and effectively trained. You won’t. If you think this is the best way for you to face an uncertain future, vaya con dios, mi amigo. I don’t.
My weapons selection and my training is considered and thoughtful, and the weapons I choose, I choose for the best tactical reasons I can develop. If you find a way to make weapons ownership illegal, I really don’t give a fuck. I’ll still own weapons illegally. It is part of me, and part of how I deal with the realities of the world.
I will no more let you determine this decision of mine than I would let you determine the ownership of my partner’s uterus. You cannot be allowed to decide these things for me, and I will not allow you to make these choices for me.
Sorry if that’s a problem in your world…
mikey
I like Alec, but I AM struck by this:
I tend to be of the opinion that whatever you can’t kill with a .22 should probably be allowed to sue your ass if you try.
Shoot something with a .22 and nick an artery or a lung and it will die, hard, in a day or two. Shoot it with a .22/250 or a .270 or a .308 and it will die in less than a minute.
Using underpowered cartridges to shoot mammals out of some mis-guided sense that you are “playing fair” is not only wrong, it it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the ballistic realities of bullets and their effects.
If you’re going to shoot something, fer gawds sake put it down NOW. Don’t inflict a mortal wound and wait for “nature to take it’s course”. That’s pretty close to evil…
mikey
Surprisingly, no. No problem. But I don’t want one, no matter how deep in the shitter this country goes. Because a country is only around so long, but your principles should be with you until you die.
I see HTML already dealt with this, but having growed up on a farm, I have to address Alec, too:
I disagree with the basic idea behind ‘home defense’ or whatever – hell, the kind of ’self-defense’ you’d wind up doing with a rifle or shotgun is ethically dicey enough, and you can basically assume in a situation like that that the other guy has a bigger gun than you and has better training in its use – and as far as I’m concerned it’s just too damn impractical even in the suburbs to haul around a handgun. If I ever feel like I’m going to be compelled to defend myself, I’d strongly prefer either some kind of melee weapon or a good few months of ground-fighting training.
The “only .22s” model works right up to the point where either A) you live in Alaska, as HTML noted; or B) you augment your food supply by hunting. I’m not sure anyone’s recently tried to take down a nice buck with a .22, but I’d predict that if they had, the experiment ended badly for both parties.
For home defense, well, I’m not sure. In the case of real, live home invasion, I’d prefer to have a short-barrelled revolver (.357, probably), and double-action (because I’m not Wyatt Earp). Even then, I’d plan on missing if I actually fired, because I’m not a trained military man or cop. Probably I’d shoot my dog or a neighbor by mistake. The other option would be a sawed-off shotgun filled with #2 shot or buckshot. But in this case, you’d better be damned sure what you’re shooting at — at the distance of an average living room, you would put a hole the size of a dinner plate through the guy. And if it turns out to be your 16-year-old daughter’s boyfriend Guido, you’re going to be spending some quality time explaining yourself to Johnny Law. If it’s your daughter … well, just imagine.
Personally, I think the best option is to remain unarmed and plan to not have a home invasion.
Mikey, that’s true, but there is an urge to overkill among some people.
Yes, a .22-250 or something with similar power is good for long-range varmints like coyotes, but for smaller targets in shorter range, you can kill them just as dead with a .22LR or, especially, a .22 mag (if the goddamn ammo weren’t so expensive).
My needs demand something deadly accurate at 50 to 100 yards that doesn’t rattle my skull when I pull the trigger.
My dad had a M1 carbine he got war surplus in, I think, 1956. For coyotes, this thing was perfect. And a damned fun weapon to shoot cans with, too. And the occasional rockchuck.
Ne, ne jsem ?eský ale mluvím ?esky. And I’d say that they’re actually just Czech, since they’re made in Uherský Brod, rather than Slovakia or Moravia. Most of the ones you buy these days were made after the fall of Communism, too.
I’ve got a CZ 452 that I bought last year, and it says “Made in the Czech Republic” on it.
That’s half true. Zlínský kraj is in southern Moravia.
And after I saw those pictures of that bear that the ranger killed with six shots from a .44 and then they found 5 .357 slugs and most of the guy that fired them inside the bear, if I go to Alaska I’m staying in the truck.
Yeah, and that’s just with Grizzlies. If I were an Inuit, or among them, I’d go Weatherby all the way (or something with equal knock-down power). Grizzlies maul you cuz they are scared or threatened. They knock you out or take you out, then leave. But a polar bear will actually hunt your ass for food if he’s hungry. Amazing and beautiful creatures but not something to fuck with.
Teh Wolverines are voting McGarnical, I mean McCain.
One rifle? For small food, big predators and some kind of self defense?
One rifle?
Remington 700 in .300 win mag.
Alternatively, it would be a Remington 700 in .270 Win.
.270 is probably the BEST single all around cartridge if you had to pick one.
But .300 mag has the knockdown power to take decent sized game, kill humans and work out to 700 meters when times got lean…
mikey
Noting stickler’s post on home defense…just the simple fact of your gun preferences indicates that you haven’t really understood what it’s all about. A short-barrelled revolver or a “sawed-off” shotgun…no. In either case, you’re basically sacrificing the very element that makes either weapon useful in an operational sense, and that’s barrel length. The only reason to go with a SB revolver is to conceal it, and if you’re at home and defending yourself and your family, hiding the pistol is the least of your worries. But the added barrel length for a full-size handgun (e.g. 4″-6″) makes it easier to aim (improved parallax) and you get improved bullet performance because of the increased velocity. And as far as the shotgun, there are legal issues about minimum barrel length and that “dinner plate sized hole through the guy” will actually probably be only 2″ across your living room (or maybe just my living room) and probably won’t exit unless he’s really thin. Instead, the bad guy ends up with a bolus of nickel-plated pellets hopefully lodged in what’s left of his heart cavity and he’s out of the fight. And if he’s not, nail him again.
See, you know just enough to think it sounds good, but in reality, the practical issues of this kind of thing aren’t that flashy. Oh, but that reminds me…in my personal opinion, any home defense firearm had better have a high-output LED flashlight permanently attached. You don’t shoot until you ID, and if you’re lucky, just the light and your command voice alone shock the assailant into freezing.
It’s about being prepared and having a tool that can keep an assailant at a distance and giving the person coming at you a moment’s pause while he or she rethinks that course of action.
You want to keep an assailant at a distance, use a glaive-guisarme…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/49503190832@N01/2028926/
You want to put a hole in someone, use a gun.
Get it straight!
Your use of “Democrat” as an adjective, rather than the accepted “Democratic”, is a mark of trolldom- you want to be considered seriously, don’t use wingnut terminology
I live in a two bedroom apartment. I have no car. All of my electronics are more then a decade old. I’m not trying to be self-righteous; I’m just poor. But I’m not the least bit convinced that my food, shelter, electricity and some modest luxuries lifestyle would have to be reduced to cave dwelling in a fair world.
You’re ignoring something in your analysis, and that’s efficiency.
I don’t think any country on earth is using its available resources to the fullest efficiency.
For example, in poor countries farming is often inefficient, producing less then would be possible with better techniques. A small infusion of resources could have huge returns, and, in fact, lessen overall consumption.
In rich countries, we have planned obsolescence. My dad’s girlfriend had a washing machine from the seventies that lasted two decades. Her next washing machine is already broken and now she’s on her third. I’m fairly sure her old seventies model didn’t require two or three times the resources of the one she bought in the 90s.
The world is terribly (And, unfortunately, purpsosefully) inefficient right now. Given that, I’m not at all convinced that abject poverty is the only possible fair world.
Well, I absolutely agree on that; I wasn’t thinking ‘fair’ at all, just ‘potential for collateral damage’. I think I was just internally working with too small an animal – every road-kill my parents ever had to deal with could be dispatched humanely with a butcher knife; we don’t really get big fauna in the southwest. You could splatter any wild animal I had encountered up until age 10 with a single .22 round, and you wouldn’t even need to shoot it – just hammer it in real hard.
The only big problem with bigger shells for bigger animals is that the bigger they get, the longer they stay lethal if you miss. And the #1 reason I don’t care for the idea of personal defense with firearms is that you’re a lot more likely to hit someone with a miss in that kind of situation.
I suppose. I don’t think I could tolerate it – I enjoy civilization whether or not I like people, and carrying-capacity for hunters tends to be really low. But ‘only .22s’ is more general-purpose – I’ve always felt hunting outside of need is a little ethically dubious, and putting yourself in a situation where that need is present makes collateral damage more unlikely both by nature of the backcountry and by the necessity of basic training. There’s less worry you’re going to kill your neighbor when he lives halfway across the country.
Incidentally, I don’t think hunting is tolerable period unless you really know what you’re doing – it’s become increasingly well-understood that poor shooting isn’t just poor sport but actively malevolent, contaminating the field and liable to cause wantless collateral damage.
This is why my stated preference for knives – that and it’s a lot easier to avoid mortally injuring or permanently maiming someone with them. This is where the gun-culture lingo kind of falls short – ‘bad guy’ etc generalizes any home invasion to someone who has come in with the intent of brutalizing you and who intends to no matter what, which is profoundly rare (and overwhelmingly a product of personal relationship issues). Most people you’d run into in your house uninvited are burglars, and if your waking presence doesn’t scare them off then physical danger generally will. Being equipped and ready for a standoff in a strange house profoundly lowers the working efficiency of burglarizing that house.
And that, my friend, is why I like civilization.
Incidentally, I’ve heard a lot of stories that involve some variant of the phrase ‘Well, I told him I was going to shoot/stab him and if I didn’t I’d be lying / he wouldn’t believe me / etc’ – those stories tend to have much less brutal resolutions when ‘stab’ is the operant verb.
That and if you know what you’re doing, there are about a half dozen ways to follow through on the implied threat behind holding out a knife without seriously injuring someone. The only equivalent with a firearm would be your limb shots, which generally impede the interloper’s ability to flee – and unless you really wanna butcher the guy that’s not desirable at all.
This thread has actually deeply disturbed me. I mean, are we seriously talking about GUNS again?
GUNS? Gun ownership in our society is a moral dilemma that is dicey at best, where even the left is prone to generalizations and oversimplifications.
During the Bush years, the opposition to him and his evil ilk was based on things that we knew were venal, horrible, absolutely morally wrong, and worst of all, clearly inept: the handling of Hurricane Katrina, the giant clusterfuck that is Iraq, the politization of the Justice Department, and so forth.
Bush II’s policies were so insanely destructive and carried out with such arrogance that it’s hard to imagine ANYONE supporting them: the famous tax cuts, for instance, particularly at a lean time accompanied by high-spending.
The first sign that the pendulum had shifted was how often Israel was discussed in the Veep debate. Israel is another example that, like guns, neither side (left or right, Arabs or Israeli) is absolutely in the moral right.
And here we are talking about GUNS again.
I guess we’ve witnessed a transformation of political discourse away from a ruinous Presidency and a clear-eyed opposition to “business as usual.” And that depresses me immensely.
‘Clear-eyed opposition’? Man, I’m probably gonna vote for Harry Reid and I don’t fucking buy that.
FWIW, the gun conversation is just one of those things that there actually is conversation to be had about. It’s one of the few issues in American politics that aren’t just a horrifying shell game. There’s no debate on the massive tax cuts during a period of prosperity – just the truth and liars trying to shout it down. Same goes for Iraq, same goes for abortion (at least the way it is now), same goes for pretty much everything you can get the opposition to agree about and everything McCain purports to stand for.
A little friendly argument is good for you, and a pretty major distinguisher between people who actually have opinions and people who (like S,N!’s resident negro-monitors Pravda and ACORN) are just bouncing from received hate to received hate.
If you thought the government was going to take your guns away, wouldn’t it make more sense to sell the ones you already had than to buy more? Buying stuff that’s going to get confiscated seems like a poor investment strategy to me.
What was the name of that wingnut hit song of 2004, again?
Oh yes, “Elections Have Consequences.”
I don’t think our yokel friends wanna dance to the scary black mooslim blackety black remix, but I hear all the kids are hip…
You either allow people to own guns or you outlaw them. Sure, you can chip away around the edges with rules about felons and the mentally ill and types of firearms and whatnot, but the vast majority of the right wing nutjobs who are buying guns to reassure themselves and indulge in movieland fantasies are law-abiding citizens, so there’s no way to stop them. You can’t make “thought crimes” a bar to ownership.
People abuse their rights in a free society. If you allow responsible people to do something, you also allow IRresponsible people to do it. That’s it. We have to live with that.
So the question should be, is there any way at all to reduce the number of people who subscribe to the nutjob ethos of gun ownership?
So the question should be, is there any way at all to reduce the number of people who subscribe to the nutjob ethos of gun ownership?
Bring back the more freewheeling gun shows and mandate free booze.
Canvassers have been turning in phony signatures ever since there have been canvassers. Phony registrations will not result in votes so there is no problem. The organization that hired the canvassers only real problem is the fraud perpetrated upon the company by the canvassers who turn in phony signatures, along with real ones so they are paid more money. Very few companies of this type have the resources or personnel to check every signature and address. The fact that ACORN provided three separate groups of signatures was a major effort in itself. It has been a problem for years. It is not news or a crime. The ACORN flap is a phony story put out by the republicans and the propaganda media is shoveling the feces to the public for them. The only party with a legitimate complaint is the company that the canvassers committed fraud against.
“There is no freedom without the freedom to be wrong.”
RedState.com is in full self-immolation mode.
I just have to mention in my self-defense (!), that I suggested short-barreled weapons for home defense for good reasons that might even trump the problem of parallax.
Shorter-barreled weapons are less likely to get tangled up in a lampshade or a curtain or your bathrobe. Precision of aim doesn’t do you a damned bit of good if your weapon is pointed at the wall because you blundered around the corner in the middle of the night and caught your Weatherby on the corner of the couch.
I prefer the animated-cartoon method of home defense, and so I keep supplies of anvils and grand pianos on hand to drop on any home invaders, revenuers, etc.
I also have a few of those bombs that look like bowling balls with a fuse sticking out of the top. If Yosemite Sam, or anyone who looks like him, tries to break into my house, I will be ready.
You fucking Americans and your guns. People here in Canada don’t actually think all that much about guns, if you can believe that. I mean, people buy them to kill animals and then eat them (the animals, that is), and there are some obsessing gun-nuts and also of course criminals, at least the ones with guns, but basically we just don’t fucking think about guns all the time. Guns, guns, guns. Get a life, assholes.
Oh I also meant to say along with Dr. Zen et. al. that this is an awesome post.
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And which of us has a queen on their money, Mr. Smarty Pants?
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