AR-15s Are Like MAGA Hats: Just Another Medium for the Same Message
I’m going to fly in the face of conventional wisdom today about guns, specifically the kind of wartime weapons used in mass shootings.
Yet another school shooting, this time in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, has triggered a wave of outrage about the weapons of choice for 16 million Americans.
It’s not the NRA at the heart of this problem. It’s not the gun lobby. It’s not right wing legislators suckling on the teat of gunpowder-flavored campaign contributions. It’s not the lack of sane gun control laws.
The particulars of the Covenant School are irrelevant to the larger issue, but what right wing noise machines are doing with the supposition about the shooter being transgender is a vital clue in understanding what’s really going on.
Noah Berlatsky opened my eyes to the bigger problem in the Public Notice substack.
The NRA’s political cash contributions, relative to the total amount of corporate money sloshing around politics, are not as great as many talking heads would have you believe.
If politicians were against gun control simply out of greed, it would be easy to change their minds. Simply outbid the NRA, and you could have all the gun control you wanted. That’s what billionaire Michael Bloomberg has tried to do since 2014. Obviously, it hasn’t solved our gun problem.
Pointing out GOP “corruption” hasn’t been very helpful either. Telling GOP voters that their reps are in thrall to the gun lobby doesn’t resonate because it’s not true. GOP reps are in thrall to their voters, who want them to fight for “gun rights.” Only 37 percent of Republicans support assault weapons bans; only 43 percent support a government database to track gun sales.
Nationally, these restrictions have majority support — overall some 63 percent of the electorate backs banning assault weapons. But GOP politicians in red areas have to win primaries dominated by constituents who see gun control as violation of their white Christian identity. More, red states, and red areas within states, have disproportionate power in the House and especially in the Senate. A minority who believe guns are a sacramental necessity to preserve white Christian masculinity are holding the rest of us hostage to their violent persecution fantasies.
Gun ownership is now an identity issue. Granted it’s an identity issue that’s been carefully cultivated over the few decades. It’s tied to the myth of victimization used by political and religious evangelicals that they’re being persecuted.
This line of thinking imagines the “good guys” as fighting against the invisible-to-the-naked eye Deep State, where brown skinned atheist liberals are seeking to “take” whatever meager privileges and possessions they have.
As Berlatsky says:
The righteous rush of identity, victimhood, superiority, and violence is more important to the GOP than money. In fact, it’s more important to them than the lives of their children.
In reality, the ideological leaders of the right are the ones lurking in the shadows, waiting to take the vestiges of rights and reason for power and personal gain based on mostly manufactured otherized threats.
It’s a matter of undermining institutions based on utilizing the public good so a society based on authoritarian and theological ideals can triumph over democracy in the name of “protecting” us.
The Los Angeles Times perfunctory post-shooting editorial comes close, oh so close, to nailing it:
We’re a country that purports to care about human life, yet we tolerate frequent mass casualties from guns. While conservative legislators in Tennessee and other states spend their time trying to ban books or drag queens , curtail gender-affirming care for transgender youth , or whitewash public school curriculum in the name of protecting children, they refuse to take meaningful steps to reduce the leading cause of their death in America: gun violence.
President Biden on Monday again called on Congress to ban assault weapons and close gun background check loopholes. A majority of Americans support stronger rules on the sale of guns and feel increasingly dissatisfied with the nation’s failure to more strictly regulate firearms. But too many state and federal lawmakers, mostly Republican, won’t buck the gun lobby and its extreme ideology that even common-sense restrictions amount to government oppression.
So, instead, Americans live with another kind of oppression — the crushing fear that they might be the next victim or survivor of gun violence.
The Missouri legislature working on defunding public libraries, Idaho criminalizing driving across its boundaries for an abortion, and Congresscritters wearing AR-15 buttons are all part of the same thing.
The evidence is all around us.
In Florida, a school principal was fired because sixth grade parents weren’t notified of an (existing) lesson plan that included viewing photos of Michelangelo’s sculpture of David.
In Wisconsin, school administrators stepped in to prevent first graders from performing “Rainbowland”, a song originally performed by national treasure Dolly Parton and ex-Mouseketeer Miley Cyrus for their school’s annual spring concert.
The war on trans persons, a school banning a Disney film on the life of Ruby Bridges, and the so-called parents rights movement are just the tentacles of this Christo-fascist octopus.
Getting rid of public education, a linchpin of democracy, is strategic goal for the far right, as Jamelle Bouie suggest in a New York Times op ed:
The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.
And, of course, the point of this movement — the point of creating this state-sanctioned heckler’s veto — is to undermine public education through a thousand little cuts, each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pump them into private ones. The Texas bill I mentioned, for instance, would give taxpayer dollars to parents who chose to opt out of public schools for private schools or even home-schooling.
The answers to these threats involve educating our communities and voting intentionally. Only when support for weapons of mass destruction becomes a liability at the polls will any of these politicians reconsider their stances.
It’s simple math:
Seventy-two percent of respondents in the ABC News/Ipsos poll said they viewed gun violence as extremely or very important in determining their votes in the upcoming midterms.
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Lead image: Christmas card of Congress member Andy Ogles
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As always, your words are perspicacious. I am convinced, I am sorry to say that the Republicans are content to have mass shootings. None of their own have been victims. Pretty sure they see it as way as maintaining a white majority of straight people come 2045, when we predicted to become a minority.
To me it is very simple. The Party of Death's values are Guns Over People.