Another gun show host murdered
Yet another high profile media gun guy gets murdered.
Steve M. tells me the wingers suspect a super secret diabolical government plot to kill all the famous gun people and then confiscate all the dispirited regular folks guns. Or something.
Lord knows I love me a good conspiracy theory but Mr. Occam is on the line reminding us famous people are always targets for crackpots. I'm thinking maybe it's not such a good idea to agitate a bunch of hot-headed, trigger happy, paranoid gun "collectors" with scary stories about gummit agents coming to git them. Nor to glorify the gun culture until it makes OK Corral shoot-outs practically mandatory.
When the answer is always a loaded gun, everything looks like a target.
The host of The Sportsman Channel’s “A Rifleman’s Journal” was shot and killed in Montana on Friday. The gunman, seemingly a jealous husband, then turned the weapon on himself.This seems pretty clearly a case where it would have happened no matter what because, it's Montana. I suspect they solve a lot of domestic disputes with guns there. But this is the third one in just a few weeks and the other two weren't over spurned lovers.
Steve M. tells me the wingers suspect a super secret diabolical government plot to kill all the famous gun people and then confiscate all the dispirited regular folks guns. Or something.
Lord knows I love me a good conspiracy theory but Mr. Occam is on the line reminding us famous people are always targets for crackpots. I'm thinking maybe it's not such a good idea to agitate a bunch of hot-headed, trigger happy, paranoid gun "collectors" with scary stories about gummit agents coming to git them. Nor to glorify the gun culture until it makes OK Corral shoot-outs practically mandatory.
When the answer is always a loaded gun, everything looks like a target.
posted by Libby Spencer at 4:37 PM
5 Comments:
There are so many gun shows, Obama will never get them all. That's what he was doing in that picture alleging that he liked to shoot skeet, you know -- taking aim at a "good guy with a gun."
I don't thing the righties have a monopoly on paranoid theories, by any means, but when they do, they build bunkers, stock them with food and ammo and spend their days training for one or more of the horrible things that are gonna happen any day now.
I suspect that the dude might well have been murdered with a number of things if the irate husband hadn't had a gun, but it's Montana, a place full of dangerous wildlife, a hunting paradise and a refuge for people who have fled west ahead of encroaching civilization and its laws regulations and other demands. Of course the guy had a gun.
But at least he was guilty of something So many people get shot for nothing.
This murder was definitely domestic, not really related to gun culture but I think the other two can be partly related to the morphing of the gun culture from more a celebration of sport shooting to some kind of paranoia fueled machismo that centers on winning imagined shoot-outs.
I see it as more of a schism. There's still an outdoors culture which has its own nostalgic imagery and icons, but that paranoia and the machismo it puts on like a suit of armor is very real and growing from what I see. A lot of people are spoiling for a fight, afraid of some catastrophe and looking for the scariest, most deadly looking weapons they can find. I don't feel any affinity for them but one gets lumped in with such people by the anti-gun culture.
I can understand the libertarian distaste for turning over our independence to various agencies, when it's not too extreme. I think it partially explains the rise of survival shows like Man Vs. Wild and Survivorman and others -- perhaps even some violent video games. For people who take pride in being able to take care of themselves, it's galling to be forced into a beehive culture where there's nothing but work and where safety is paramount. There's an inherent paranoia at both poles. Many of those discontents of civilization are in places like Montana or Alaska for that very reason.
And who speaks for the middle these days?
Who can even find the middle when on the gun control side you have kids getting suspended from school for pointing their fingers at each other or eating their poptart into the wrong shape?
So many of history's horrors have begun with the deliberate polarization of societies. People are defective and we fall prey to it every time and often it doesn't end without the horror.
And yes, being a kid in school these days sounds really Orwellian. Are we trying to breed a generation of rebels?
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