In his latest column in the San Francisco Chronicle, the great Mark Morford takes a look at the issue, in his own unique and inimitable style.
An excerpt:
-----
You know what offers just tremendous amounts of pleasure? Shooting guns.-----
It's true. Shotguns, handguns, rifles, BB guns, squirt guns, you name it. Try it yourself: Just head out to a shooting range and have the gun boys yank you some clay pigeons and blast those things out of the sky and oh my God it's just a ridiculous barefaced thrill, a sense of godlike power, a rush of adrenaline to go along with a hot buzz of precision and concentration and the smell of gunpowder and much manly macho grunting.
I am not at all joking. I've done it. I've even enjoyed it, quite a bit. Sport shooting is an intense rush, a unique sort of pleasure, scary and powerful and deadly and fascinating and, in its deep, pure violence, rather beautiful. What's more, guns can be gorgeous pieces of precision engineering, sexy and brutal and often superbly made and so dumbly phallic and obviously homoerotic it makes the men of the NRA tingle every night, secretly.
But let this be known: Guns are also, quite clearly, something that could exit the human experience entirely and we would, very simply, only be the better for it. Much, much better. Oh yes we would.
Look, it's easy enough to point out all the obvious gun-control arguments the brutal Virginia Tech massacre slaps across the face of the pro-gun culture. Guns are far too easy to obtain. Gun fetishism is far too prevalent and glamorized and legitimized in the States. Guns are often easier to get hold of than a driver's license and we don't even perform instant background checks, and in places like Texas it's now easier than ever not only to own a gun, but the state's newly expanded gun laws mean it's A-OK to shoot and kill someone for pretty much looking at you sideways, and if you do, not only is it unlikely you will go to jail for it, many Texans will actually applaud.
But the truth is, these issues aren't really the point. And as many politicians -- even Democrats -- are already pointing out, new gun-control legislation in the wake of VT isn't exactly a priority, mostly due to the vicious power of the tiny-but-vocal gun lobby and especially given the faux-cowboy gun-lovin' warmonger who currently holds the White House veto stamp in his insolent little fist right now.
But even the obvious fact that no new gun-control laws are likely to emerge hasn't stopped the pro-gunners from tossing up what is easily my favorite pro-gun argument of all time, one that's popped back up on blogs and forums and in right-wing columns all over the Net in response to VT, like some sort of cute, thuggish mantra of happy cancerous violence.
It goes like this: If only more people had guns, no one would get shot. If only everyone was armed and everyone was packing heat and everyone knew everyone else could kill them at a moment's notice, why, no one would dare shoot each other for fear of getting killed themselves before they even had a chance to enjoy their own murderous rage.
In other words, the solution to the too-many-guns-too-easily problem? Even more guns.
More to the point: If the professors and students at Virginia Tech just so happened to carry their own swell Glock 9mm in their backpacks or in their purses just like insane sullen loner Cho Seung-Hui, maybe he would've been less likely to go on that rampage because, gosh golly, he'd surely know he'd be quickly shot dead by 100 trigger-ready students as soon as he fired the first shot. And what satisfaction is there in a brutal gun rampage if you don't get to kill more than a handful of kids? It's such perfectly insane logic, they should print it on the NRA brochure. Hell, maybe they do.
I love this line of thinking. It's like bashing your own skull with a brick and calling it intellectual stimulation.
Read more.
No comments:
Post a Comment