Attitude Check

Slate has a regular "column" (the word feels a bit dated in the online world) called the Human Guinea Pig; the correspondent does things that the readers don't, won't or can't try themselves.

This week's episode: The Pig shoots a gun.

That's worth a (upcoming) piece on its own.

But 'til then, Shannon Love's response is a great one:

So what was the wild, dangerous thing that some reader sent the "Human Guinea Pig" out to do?

She went to fire a gun at a shooting range.

Nothing so reveals the red/blue divide so starkly as the blue-zoners' prissy and often hysterical attitude towards guns. Reading this article is like watching the old movie where a city slicker tries to mount a horse at a dude ranch and ends up facing the wrong way. I find it uproariously funny that going to shoot a gun is the subject of breathless journalism. What's up for next week, power drills?

Love both pegs the attitude perfectly and, I think, sells the actual article in Slate (of which more later).

But where the piece intersects with policy, it shows part of the red/blue culture war that's fascinating:

Red-zoners just can't take blue-zoners seriously when they talk about guns because they come off as hysterical, pitchfork-waving lunatics. Their perception of the dangerousness of firearms is so over-the-top as to reduce their arguments to absurdity. They sound as credible as Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson describing the nightlife in San Francisco. Yet blue-zoners expect red-zoners to defer to them in political debates about guns and get angry and confused when they don't. They can't relate to the perspective of the red-zoners at all.

Guns have been a leading indicator of the red-blue culture war for longer than we knew there was one. Easy example; Minnesota's drift from DFL gulag to incipient red state has been presaged by the fortunes of, among other things, the Minnesota Personal Protection Act's voyage from wild hair to dark horse to law of the state (and, fittingly and frustratingly enough, its current limbo-by-judicial fiat).

And it'll continue to - because guns, especially handguns and the faith in self and implied rejection of government supremacy they represent, are the exposed, throbbing nerve of the battle between red and blue.

Posted by Mitch at November 22, 2004 05:56 AM | TrackBack