Let me say from the outset that I have nothing against guns, per se. I know several people around Mountain Home who hunt not only for the sport of it, but for subsistence -- as they say, to fill the freezer. I suspect, however, that those who support "gun rights" know that, in the absence of effective government, the war of all against all will prevail. For example, chatting with a customer in our store, it came out that we had once lived in Chicago. The average Mountain Home denizen, of the sort that frequents our failing little store, cannot quite imagine what it might mean to live in a place like "Chicago" beyond what they've seen on the crime procedurals on network television. They see it, in other words, "Chicago" symbolically as a festering underworld where the war of all against all actually does prevail. Of course, I experienced none of that. In our Lombard home, I experienced what is probably the typical suburban life. Our home in Farmington, New Mexico -- a town in many ways similar to Mountain Home -- was robbed not once, but twice, but the only crime we experienced in Chicago was credit card fraud. Certainly no violent or invasive crime, not even the threat of it, not once.
Sorry, a bit side-tracked. Start again. Chatting with a customer in our store, I mentioned that we had lived in Chicago. He said, predictably, that he could never live in a place like "that" -- where all that "that" entails now goes without saying, but I suspect it wears gang attire and has a black or hispanic face. He went on to say he had to drive through "Chicago" in the past as a trucker. I'm pretty sure he was referring to interstate 80, and the "Chicago" he drove through wasn't "Chicago," but actually Gary, Indiana. The finer points of the megapolis were lost on him. It was all "Chicago," where he felt threatened enough that "my gun went on the seat right next to me" and "I got the hell out as quick as I could." I didn't pursue the thought, but even in the cab of a semi-truck, tooling down the Interstate, he clearly felt that the normal protections of civilized society no longer prevailed -- that he needed to "protect himself" and he needed a gun to do it -- but rationally speaking, I'm not sure what exactly he would be protecting himself from? what exactly he feared enough that he had to arm himself? Had I pressed (and I didn't) I'm sure he would have resisted its articulation with a fraught "you know."
At the root of this discussion around guns is fear. The braggadocio that comes with the assertion of "self-protection" would seem at first glance the opposite, but it's an inarticulate fear that must remain inarticulate, because to articulate it, actually say it out loud, would reveal prejudice, at best, racism and xenophobia at worst -- a fear and visceral loathing of the brown and black faces that are becoming the minority-majority in the United States. They have taken the cities and are now expanding into rural America, but to actually say it out loud, to articulate the minority-majority apocalypse, would reveal that it is almost as irrational a fear as the zombie apocalypse. Of course the story is much more complex, but at some level the cynical attitude of the gun-rights republicans prey on this fear of the war of all against all, or maybe more accurately, my kind against the unknown other. Guns, particularly if "they" have guns, are a way of leveling the playing field.
I say "almost" as irrational because there is a coherence at the center of it. On the one side, there is a fear that arises from the perception of a war of all against all, a war in which the lone cowboy must "protect" himself and his kindred and his kind against the marauding others, a war in which he must strap on his concealed weapon each and every day. The Hobbesian answer to this was, of course, the leviathan, government write large in the form of the sovereign, but those who fear the apocalypse would have none of that. On the other side, there is a fear that arises from a conspiracy laden fear that the government itself has been co-opted by malign forces, a fear no doubt exacerbated by the black face that now inhabits, of all places, the white house. The government is no answer, and lacking that answer, well, we are left with the war of all against all, which necessitates the self-protection of guns, and not just hunting implements, but real anti-personnel weapons, with "stopping power."
No comments:
Post a Comment