But in 1966, during the Texas Tower Massacre, a Co-Op manager named Allen Crum grabbed a rifle and accompanied three Austin police officers up into the tower and helped give them cover while they took down the sniper. But that was in 1966. Today Crum would have been shot for picking up the rifle and Officer Martinez, who picked up a shotgun and fired into the shooter’s prone body after he had already been severely wounded, would have been dismissed from the force, put on trial and would have spent the next decade dodging civil suits and doing infomercials to raise money.
And that’s why we’re so much safer today, than we were then, on our Zero Tolerance campuses and in our Gun-Free Zones, where no one is allowed to have so much as a pocket knife and no one can do a thing when a shooter arrives except lie on the floor and hope that the killer picks another victim.
At Salon, which is like Slate, if Slate were a failure, Amanda Marcotte urges that we attack “not the guns themselves, but gun culture.” Amanda, mainly known for getting the Duke case wrong and being fired from the Edwards campaign, means that we should ban gun ads in newspapers.
“A lot of liberals aren’t tuned into this, because they live in their own enclaves and absorb media that doesn’t really cater to the gun crowd, but gun advertising is common in many markets,” Amanda breathlessly reports to those organic pastry shoppers of San Francisco and the Off-Broadway crowd taking in the latest transsexual cabaret spectacular. While she never does get around to defining what the dreaded gun culture is, she does mention that, “Americans simply don’t like giving up perceived rights.”
If only they spent more time in organic pastry shops and transsexual cabarets they might realize that they are only giving up their perceived Bill of Rights for the real right to free birth control in the best bargain since Esau traded his birthright for a mess of organic free trade pottage.
Finally Jessica Pieklo, writing at a site whose menu is limited to “Animals”, “Women”, “Politics”, “Food”, “LGBT” and “Global Development”, in that order, informs us that gun culture and rape culture are a product of “white masculinity”. An hour ago I just passed a non-white driver whose car had 9MM decals on his windows and was blasting a song where the word “hoes” came up a lot, but there are topics that just can’t be discussed even for a site that covers everything from LGBT to Animals.
For all the loose talk about American gun culture, no one really seems to be able to define what it is. Defining gun culture by the entertainment industry drifts too far into Hollywood and Detroit, and away from the rural culture that is the real target of gun control culture. And that just leaves gun controllers grasping at gun ads and gun ownership, and the omnipresent white devil who never stops buying Manhattan for a bottle of whiskey and objectifying things in ways that males of no other race do.
Instead there are a thousand articles written in children’s blood crying out, “We can’t just do nothing.” Something must be done. Now. Last week. If only we ban more weapons, we can be as safe as Norway, home of the worst shooting spree of all, or Connecticut, which already has an assault weapons ban. And after those screeds come calls from politicians to “set aside the rhetoric” and have a serious conversation about taking the Bill of Rights out back and putting a bullet in its head. For the children who had no one to protect them when a gunman came to their school and will still have no one to protect them when gun control culture gets its way.
After these come a torrent of armchair psychology analyses of America’s gun culture, which are only slightly more elegant versions of Jessica Pieklo’s thesis about Freud and Michael Moore’s thesis about rural America. And those are what gun culture is really about. After all how can you be confident of your own superiority unless you have a documentary and a hundred articles affirming it for you by the traditional method of putting down the people at the bottom of the ladder.