#GunControl as a sign of liberal cultural superiority

**Posted by Phineas

I came across an article this morning by Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner in which sees the current efforts to restrict our Second Amendment rights as another front in the “culture war,” a war in which the Left sees itself as morally superior to everyone else. That is, you can’t have rational reasons for disagreeing with them on gun-rights issues, you must be morally wrong.

The spark for his essay is a new book by Dan Baum, who’s both a Jewish liberal Democrat and a gun owner, called “Gun Guys.” As someone who sits in both worlds (the liberal and the gun-fan), Baum is able to understand how both sides thinks. Carney introduce’s Baum’s book with some examples of how the left sees gun enthusiasts as not just wrong, but inferior, even evil. Here are a couple:

The Post’s Gene Weingarten in 2011 spat on the Second Amendment as “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.”

After Columbine, a Boston Herald op-ed described the average participant in a 1999 Boston Common pro-gun rally as a wannabe “hicksville cowboy, as in way out there, somewhere off the Mass Pike or at the far reaches of 93. From towns with something to prove and lots of Amvets posts.”

And President Obama in 2008 famously told a wealthy crowd at a San Francisco fundraiser that rural voters “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them … “

Well, the “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” clearly is mutual.

From this, Carney segues to Baum’s discussion of the liberal-left’s loathing for the culture that guns represent and how they think they can use the law to control or destroy that culture:

Liberals, Baum writes, “recognized the gun as the sacred totem of the enemy, the embodiment of this abhorrent world view. They believed that they could weaken the enemy by smashing his idols — by banning the gun if possible … “

Many liberals hate it that some conservatives have a different set of values, morals and aesthetics — and so these liberals want to use the federal government to fix that.

(…)

“Assault rifles,” writes Baum, “were just as powerful symbolically as they were ballistically. A renewed assault-rifle ban would really smash the enemy’s idols.”

Also, when speaking about sales without background checks, gun controllers always refer to “gun shows.” Most guns used in murders aren’t bought at gun shows — they’re stolen or bought on the street. But gun shows are large gatherings of the “gun tribe” — and so they must be shut down.

Not mentioned directly, but certainly a subtext in this article and, I suspect, Baum’s book, is the idea that gun control as an assault on the so-called “gun tribe” is, as Dan Bongino put it, a form of people control. And that is the real objective of progressivism.

Makes sense, when you’re convinced you’re superior.

RELATED: And if you need another example of how the other side sees us, don’t forget, if you oppose gun control, you might be an Antisemite.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

The Preemptive Offender says:

March 31, 2013 at 3:34 pm

And so it shall be until we learn to make the case that to be armed is a matter of civic duty — that a man who spurns arms ownership and training is a poor example to others, for by shirking his duty to be ready for militia call-up, he encourages others to believe that they can enjoy freedom, the fruit of the blood sacrifices of a million men, without contributing to its maintenance and defense.

Drew the Infidel says:

March 31, 2013 at 4:22 pm

Blacks, gays, and liberals are the most intense and vituperative racists and bigots on the planet. Their most curious and fallacious aspect is their childlike contention that such is not the case but that those things are the attributes of those they hate and demean. Sorry, but you cannot have it both ways.

Carlos says:

March 31, 2013 at 8:22 pm

“…is the idea that gun control as an assault on the so-called “gun tribe” is, as Dan Bongino put it, a form of people control.”

Truer words were never spoken, but that goes for EVERY idol of the left, including environmentalism and AGW (maybe a subset of environmentalism, but strong enough to be considered on its own).

The youngins taught in guvmint indoctrination camps (a.k.a., public schools) are being taught by fools that have been convinced of the superiority of elitism, of the absolute surety of academic theory (that, in their muddled minds, has become “fact,” not “theory”), and of the unquestioned necessity to get the unwashed masses to cower at the jackboot of guvmint. After all, the socialist professors wouldn’t lead them astray, would they? And it’s always a good feeling knowing that one is god and never has to bow to God.

Why is it so important to dangle the carrot of universal higher education to the prols? Because it’s THEIR education system, it’s THEIR means of controlling the masses, it’s THEIR way of making sure the masses don’t wander from the plantation and, if they do, they (the elite academics) won’t have to dirty their hands with destroying the wanderers because their foolish bots will do that for them, ensuring continuity in the quest for Utopia.

(Only problem is, too many of the “great unwashed” know the streets of Utopia are paved with pyrite.)

April 1, 2013 at 8:36 pm

Seems to me if the elitist/academia theorist tribe really wanted to protect “the children,” they’d figure out that the bullies who shoot up schools and theaters and malls are more afraid of getting shot at than they are of being arrested for carrying guns in violation of some simpleton “gun-free zone” law.

Like some prisoners I used to work with would ask when told they couldn’t do something, “What are they gonna do? Throw me in jail?”

Simply by already plotting to shoot some people the shooters are already subject to incarceration. Throwing them in jail is the least of their worries at that point, and it’s time the theorists/bleeding hearts recognized that.