I was standing beside my car in a 7-Eleven parking one recent morning when I stunned speechful by a bumper sticker on a pickup truck preparing to exit the lot.
What I mean is, the message struck me as so infuriatingly, nonsensically aggrieved that I wanted to walk over, pound on the cab window and scream “WTF?!”
I didn’t do that, but I did ask, “What do you have to be mad about?” loud enough that I startled the neighborhood not-quite-right guy, who was distractedly presiding over the parking lot. The driver gave no indication he’d heard me. The pickup pulled into traffic and began rolling down the road.
The bumper sticker, now disappearing from sight, read, “I’m a Bitter Gun Owner—And I Vote.”
This was my reaction. First, this is America, which is to any semblance of sane gun laws as Syria is to civil liberties or North Korea is to frowning on cult-of-personality dictatorships. While technically the United States is a Western nation, when it comes to gun availability and the resulting violence, fatalities and incarceration rates, we stand alone as an Old West nation. On these shores, a shootout’s possible at any given time.
Second, I was thinking, this is Virginia. (I was in Alexandria at the time, and the pickup bore Virginia plates.) The commonwealth of Virginia has lax gun-control laws even by American standards. I knew for a fact that, among other things, Virginians are legally permitted to openly carry a holstered handgun just about anywhere. I also knew that, on the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence’s national scorecard, Virginia typically brings up the rear in comparison with more progressive states. (“Progressive,” again, being a relative term.)
What a quick bit of Internet research subsequently elicited was that Virginia’s exact Brady Campaign score is 16 out of 100. “Virginia has weak gun laws,” the Brady summary reads, “that help feed the illegal gun market, allow the sale of guns without background checks and put children at risk.”
As it happened, within hours of my bumper sticker sighting, the Courts of Justice Committee of the Virginia State Senate approved a measure that, if passed by the full legislature, would eliminate the state’s (presumably tyrannous) one-gun-a-month restriction on handgun purchases.
So, when I read that bumper sticker, my visceral rejoinder was, “Bitter? Really?! About what, exactly?”
When I next got to a computer, I Googled the offending phrase, seeking any available insight into what might sour a Virginia gun owner on a political system that all but legalizes a matrimonial state between citizen and firearm.
Ah! The bumper sticker made better contextual sense, at least, when the search results popped up. The sentiment’s genesis had been a speech Barack Obama, then a candidate for president, had given in April 2008 to a private audience at a California fundraiser. In an unfortunate turn of phrase, Obama had expressed his view that some Americans who feel economically dispossessed and betrayed by their government may “get bitter” in response, and may “cling to their guns or religion.”
The comments sparked a huge controversy at the time and sent the Obama campaign temporarily on its heels. Even fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, then duking it out with Obama for the party’s presidential nod, made political hay of what she described as Obama’s “elitist and divisive comments.”
But to my recollection the backlash from evangelicals had been the harshest; I’d kind of forgotten the “guns” part of the quote. At any rate, Obama ended up winning the election, and he’s been steadily demonized by the political Right in countless other ways in the years since. That explained why I hadn’t made the connection to the speech when I read the bumper sticker.
What the Web search also suggested, unsurprisingly, was that the bumper sticker may well have been manufactured and distributed by the National Rifle Association. A brief visit to the NRA’s Web site—a momentary touch-down that nevertheless left me feeling only slightly less soiled than I might have by visiting the Man-Boy Love Society’s membership page—turned up a T-shirt the NRA had marketed in response to the Obama quote that bore precisely the wording of the bumper sticker. Gun owners had been urged to wear the T-shirt proudly, in order to show their “support for the NRA and the Second Amendment,” and, in the process, to “send an unmistakable message to legislators.”
My reaction there was, “As if Congress and the vast majority of state legislatures aren’t already in the NRA’s back pocket, or cowed into submission by its lobbying power!” Because the one compliment, if you want to call it that, that I’ll pay to the NRA is that they’re awesome at their job. This, to me, is evidenced both at the macro level—where the Second Amendment has become so sanctified in the national psyche that even so-called liberals don’t question its modern-day applicability—and at the micro level, where I’d never think of displaying a bumper sticker stating, “I’m a Bitter Advocate of Strict Gun Control Laws—And I Vote.” Why wouldn’t I? Not because it isn’t true, but because I’m genuinely fearful that some card-carrying, firearm-toting NRA member would shoot my car windows out. And possibly save some lead for me, depending on what kind of day he (or she) had had.
(On a related note, my other favorite bumper sticker I’ll never commission or display, for similar fear of violent reprisal, would read: “It’s Clearly a Choice, but Only Debatably a Baby.”)
Do I sometimes wish for the courage of my convictions? Sure. I mean, I’ve donated money to the Brady Campaign in the past, and I’ve signed the odd gun-control petition over the years, but I’ve never done anything notably public or strident. For one thing, the NRA has managed to pretty much convince me that Resistance Is Futile—that is, that I’ll need to move to Canada or Europe to ever live under laws that strictly or even meaningfully limit private gun ownership. For another thing, per my earlier allusion, gun nuts—of which this country seemingly has too many to count—scare the shit out of me. To put it colloquially, Them People Be Crazy.
I’ve been thinking this week, too, about the resignation from Congress of Gabrielle Giffords. A deranged gunman wielding a legally purchased firearm nearly killed her, did slay six people, and injured an additional 13 individuals in that January 2011 shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona. Politicians from both side of the political aisle wept a few days ago as they saluted the former congresswoman’s courage, marveled at her progress and wished her Godspeed on her continuing rehabilitative journey. For her part, Giffords vowed to return to elective office one day.
Nowhere in the Giffords exit story, however, was the need for sane gun laws mentioned. In the days immediately following the tragedy, that question got a nanosecond of airplay, but the predictable “Guns don’t kill people—people kill people” chorus quickly drowned out such talk. As it always does in this country. In a state like Arizona, any gun-control message never stood a chance, anyway. Arizona’s Brady Campaign score is zero, making Virginia look a surrender monkey in the fight for a Well-Armed Militia Nation. To be sure, Giffords herself was very much a pro-gun Democrat during her time in Congress. While it would be interesting to know if her views have shifted since her cranial encounter with a bullet, any personal change of heart would be immaterial should she indeed ever seek her old congressional seat. In the Grand Canyon State, you can’t advocate for gun control and win. Candidate Giffords presumably would keep any such thoughts to herself.
I recently happened upon a great op-ed piece on the upshot (no pun intended) of the Tucson tragedy. It wasn’t published in a prominent journal of opinion and wasn’t linked to Giffords’ resignation, but that event clearly was the reason the satirical Web publication The Onion had resurrected and highlighted the link. The faux essay by a made-up commentator named Ellen Crawford-Price was dated May 24, 2011, and bore the headline, “Let’s Just Go Ahead and Assume We’ve Learned the Lessons of the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting.”
The writer noted that she hadn’t “heard so much as a word” in the three months since the shooting about such briefly raised issues as gun control, America’s treatment of its mentally ill (a reference to accused gunman Jared Loughner) or the “inflammatory political rhetoric” that renders impossible any meaningful discussion of such matters. But that being the case, “Crawford-Price” continued with a benefit-of-the-doubt shrug, “I’m going to go ahead and assume that at some point we thoroughly explored those complex issues, resolved them, and now are living our lives based on the lessons we learned from the in-depth conversations I assume we had.”
She felt safe in making those assumptions, she continued, “Because, after all, if we had just brushed aside the life-altering assassination attempt of a congresswoman, as well as the death of a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl without seizing the opportunity to address our nation's glaring problems, then all the shooting victims would have died in vain, and all 300 million of us would be irresponsible, superficial hypocrites with the attention spans of newborns.”
That made me laugh.
But of course, the laughter was … what’s the word I’m looking for?
Oh yeah: bitter.
(Editor’s note: For a related post, read “Song Remains the Same,” from July 30 of last year. Sometimes I’m only belatedly aware that I’ve repeated myself. So sue me. Just don’t shoot me.)
No comments:
Post a Comment