Gun nuts' sick power trip: What's really behind the "open carry" crusade (Click here to read more)
Why do gunslingers want to terrify others? A desire to change how you think and behave by conditioning -- or fear
Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig.
When it comes to inspiring audiences to dizzying, irrational fear, right-wing media is especially skillful. Take, for example, the "knockout game" hysteria of last year, in which Fox pundits like Sean Hannity did their best to marshal a handful of disparate cases of real or alleged violence into evidence of widespread, growing, untargeted murderous intent among primarily black teenagers. Was the knockout game ever a rising threat, ever a swelling trend? It now seems unlikely, though the notion that unarmed black teenagers should be seen as de facto lethal coincided rather curiously with Fox's banner-waving over the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case. Whatever the source, the right-wing media narrative surrounding the knockout game proved that the intentional generation of fear is a tactic far-right media is comfortable engaging in, and the performance of similar tactics in real life should be understood to have similar political purposes.
.
The "open carry" movement is one such tactic. Weekly, it seems, new cells of gunslingers take it upon themselves to disturb order and intimidate innocent civilians in order to establish a nebulous, rotating series of political aims. A Richmond iteration of open-carrying young men stated they wanted to "raise awareness of responsible gun ownership," as though the population of Virginia were somehow wholesale unaware of guns. In Arlington, Texas, the open carry commandos who valiantly terrified the staff of a Jack-in-the-Box claimed they merely wanted to "make it as normal as possible for people to see a gun like a fashion accessory … this is America." In every instance of open carry demonstrations there are two constants: some kind of constitutional concern mashed together with a host of other orthogonal aims, and a roundly frightened public.
.
Meditate for a moment on the notion of making people comfortable with the sight of guns in public via habituating them to the instinctual terror of seeing one, and two issues immediately arise: firstly, it resembles other illogical forms of activism in which the goal is wholly incompatible with the means, such as murdering abortion providers to achieve a culture of life; secondly, it is, above all else, an effort at achieving control.
[...]
No comments:
Post a Comment