Happiness is a warm gun: ‘Totalitarianism with a human face’(Why are so many Americans buying guns?)

I was invited via an email from Cabela’s to trick out my AR. It took a minute to figure that they were talking about an automatic rifle. The picture looked like the M-16 I carried 40 years ago in military service, but more upscale. I don't own an AR. I don't even have a gun. It is usually nice shirts and camping equipment I get from them. So it was a little surprising.

I like Cabela’s. When we lived in Michigan I'd take my kids to see their beautiful four-story displays of bears, coyotes, foxes in hinterland settings. It seemed a representative part of glorious northern Michigan known as the UP. I tend to like guns as well. But the AR is not a hunting gun. It is a war weapon and a lot of people are buying them. In fact, guns today are said to be the only bright spot on the economy and Cabela’s stock is booming.

But why are so many Americans buying guns? It has been like this for several years now. Since Obama was elected president. The question should be asked in the same way Thomas Mann once asked, "Why are they disinfecting the streets of Venice?” Is something dark and unknown rising within us? Is it already here?

We enter seasons ahead unlike any we had seen in the passing century. New trends, ideas and people — the Tea Party, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, for beginners — tend to bring shock, even apoplexy to the institutionalized and sanctioned establishment. But the institutionalized norms are rapidly passing. Even the movie “The Hunger Games” brings the predictable scorn and ironic responses on the neurasthenic left and by establishment trend-setters like Vanity Fair and The New York Times. The rising times will not be like the receding times and these new trends mark the rising times. And so does this phenomenon of rapidly rising gun sales.

In the early part of the last century, the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung developed "psychological types" — which Myers-Briggs and other personality tests today are based on — because the German national character was rapidly changing and he wanted to know why and what it meant. The great poets and visionaries, Maude Gunn, Yeats and Mann, sensed it as well and dreamed of blood flowing in rivers. Our institutionalized entertainment, educational and information networks today lacks these canaries in the coal mine. Liberals outnumber conservatives 88 to three in college humanities classrooms and the pillars of public information, the three networks and the two major newspapers are overwhelmingly liberal, yet the population actually breaks about even, liberal and conservative. This is, to say the least, unresponsive; a dream of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World come true which might even be called, to paraphrase Susan Sontag, “totalitarianism with a human face” — a face so accurately caricatured today in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games. So system shock will be greater, with greater difficulty to adapt when new realities arise.

Mann wrote Death in Venice a hundred years ago this year. And our American world this year appears today to be sending signs of subtle and unconscious change — a veiled elephant is entering the room — some of them transfiguring, some of them foreboding. Our world changes. The question is, to what?

Why is it that no one is talking about the proposed United Nations firearms treaty? If enacted, and ratified by our DemonRAT controlled Senate, it would:

1. Enact tougher licensing requirements, creating additional bureaucratic red tape for legal firearms ownership.

2. Confiscate and destroy all “unauthorized” civilian firearms (exempting those owned by our government of course).

3. Ban the trade, sale and private ownership of all semi-automatic weapons (any that have magazines even though they still operate in the same one trigger pull – one single “bang” manner as revolvers, a simple fact the ant-gun media never seem to grasp).

4. Create an international gun registry, clearly setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation.

5. Override our national sovereignty, and in the process, providing license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights.

To oppose this effort, U.S. Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kans.) has introduced legislation to prevent any arms treaty from infringing the right to keep and bear arms in this country. The Second Amendment Sovereignty Act, S. 2205, introduced March 19, 2012, would prohibit the administration from using “the voice, vote, and influence of the United States, in connection with negotiations for a United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, to restrict in any way the rights of United States citizens under the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, or to otherwise regulate domestic manufacture, assembly, possession, use, transfer, or purchase of firearms, ammunition, or related items, including small arms, light weapons, or related materials.”

I encourage my fellow FRiends to voice their support of Senator Moran’s bill to their state senators.

"But the AR is not a hunting gun. It is a war weapon and a lot of people are buying them."

So were semiautomatic versions of M-14s, M-1s and Springfields. There were also the rifles of our former enemies. Every generation of enthusiasts has 'em. They just happen to hold a fascination for more city folks now.

Soldier's rifles are not the most practical self-defense weapons in most cases, but they might do well enough in some of the rare rural incidents. Shotguns would be better in most cases, IMO, with plenty of training and practice. All kinds of loads for those.

My first M-16 at Ft. Leonard Wood had an AR-15 part, IIRC (maybe a marking on the lower receiver?). And yeah, it was full auto. It fired more dependably than the second one that I was issued there (probably an M-16 with some newer guts). ...then an M-203 and others at home units afterward.

Fickle wounding machines, IMO. Raindrops beat 5.56 mm rounds like bald-headed stepchildren. But they're okay for keeping foreign enemies very busy up to 300 meters (for the few who could hit 300 very often). Whole lotta commies carrying their buddies going on. Those rounds don't like leaves much, either, or any heavy cover.

All of that complaining said, the M-16 is a great weapon, if you keep it real clean. Don't even get me started on the M-60 (carried one many miles one year while playing Army).

Maybe I should get a semiautomatic, "sporter" version of one of our enemies' weapons from the time that I was in the Guard (incl. end of Cold War). It would be a tinkering/ballistics challenge like...learning to play the fiddle poorly. Or maybe I could be a poser, grow some dreadlocks, put on some shades, and walk around naked with that commie weapon just for styles' sake. ;-) [Joke. I don't even do drugs. Hate 'em. They're for slaves. But silliness, yeah.]

Or on second thought, maybe when the civilian fake commando craze is over. They'll be pretty darned cheap then. Maybe even re-barreling them will be cheap, after so many fools have overheated the bores by firing as fast as goons through whole mags. Heh.

BTW, full auto rifles are hardly ever useful selected on full auto. Some rare instances at extremely close range in jungle or urban, maybe (but not peacetime urban). Firing full auto bursts with enough accuracy is somewhat like firing a shotgun but a little more time-consuming to get good at.

If government-employed people want to throw S at the F after being unable to deal with being laid off, I'll just watch from up here, in the peaceful middle of nowhere. Maybe they'll lose some weight and get real, that is, those very few who would even learn to make good use of cover.

Firearms are okay. I like to watch the Youtube monkeys burn those barrels up and argue over brand names. ;-) And yeah, I might even go out, from time to time, to ring a silhouette or three with firearms technology from around a 100 years ago. [It's really only the math and physical problems that I enjoy once in a great while. The actual range thing is too boring after having fired many 10s of thousands of rounds and done so many other things for so many hours on ranges.]

The economy will probably get much worse, but that won't bring violence to every home, in my opinion. It will mean that many more people will get very poor, and maybe more of 'em will get religion. Poverty eventually has a way of making people want to be good. See the Great Depression. Oh, yeah, there'll be more from the robbers losing their government incomes, pensions, or what have you. But they'll eventually start being good, too, one way or the other. ;-)

Override our national sovereignty, and in the process, providing license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights.

The hell it would.

You can't abrogate whole sections of the Constitution by treaty. Every L1 student knows that.

And in case Obozo thinks he can make it stick, he has got a super-ugly education coming to him.

"Experience keeps a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other." -- Franklin

That includes Harvard-educated, or should I say "passed-through", hothouse babies like Obozo.

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