shotbanner.jpeg

November 23, 2004

Firepower Healing

Yesterday, I commented on a piece in Slateinvolving a liberal writer going to a rifle range.

Yesterday's bit was mainly on the purpose the gun issue serves - as a bellwether on many other social issues, as they were and continue to be in Minnesota as re the concealed carry issue.

But the piece itself, by Emily Yoffe, rates some comment.

It's actually fairly interesting, and a lot more even-handed than one would expect from Slate:

In Human Guinea Pig I engage in unusual activities and hobbies. This time I wanted to see if a novice—a nervous novice—could in a few lessons learn how to be a decent shot. I do understand that there is nothing unusual about owning firearms. Surveys show almost half of American households have them.
And she touches on the comedy of errors that is urban gun control:
But I live in the District of Columbia, which has one of the nation's toughest gun laws. Residents are not allowed to own handguns, and if one of us feels a need to discharge a weapon, we are supposed to file a request with the chief of police asking for permission. (He must spend all his time answering yes, as D.C. has one of the country's highest murder rates.)
Cultural divide? Natch:
So anathema are guns among my friends that when one learned I was doing this piece, he opened his wallet, silently pulled out an NRA membership card, then (after I recovered from the sight) asked me not to spread it around lest his son be kicked out of nursery school.
Yoffe's education? Fascinating? Check:
Ricardo had me watch a short film as part of my gun-safety training, and in it the narrator explained that guns are simply machines. Machines can't hurt you, he said; the danger lies in the person operating the machine. OK, I thought, but if I am inept in the handling of my blow-dryer, I am unlikely to vaporize anyone's kidney. As he went through his safety lectures, Ricardo emphasized which firearms would be best for my "personal protection," even though as a District resident this was virtually out of the question, and even though I assured him that no one was after me. Undeterred, his top recommendation was a pump-action shotgun. "Nothing else makes that sound," he said, and even I could conjure up that ka-chung. "Hearing that sound alone can negate the need to fire. It makes such a sweet song."
Now, an aside.

I've been involved in guns and the victim rearmament movement since I bought my first rifle, when I was 22 (I wasn't raised around guns in my house, more's the pity). To my knowledge, I was the first radio talk show host in the Twin Cities to actively stump for a rollback of Minnesota's parochial and racist concealed carry laws (in 1987, about the time Florida started the national move toward liberalized carry laws for the law-abiding).

Understand that the pro-victim-disarmament movement has never had much in the way of evidence supporting their stance - and that even what they put up as evidence never actually stands up to detailed scrutiny. That's gotta be frustrating. It's perhaps understandable that so many victim-disarmament advocates have acted out on that frustration; I've been called a lot of names over the years, had ehough hardballs lobbed at my character and anscestry and morality enough to make a pretty good make a pretty good triple-A rhetorical shortstop.

And when the frustration reaches its peak, they all - all of them, every one, from the most moronic Saint Paul DFL petty hack up to Cacklin' Catherine Lanpher (in her pre-MPR stint at KSTP-AM) - falls back on what they consider the nuclear option:

I think guns are a substitute for some sexual shortcoming on the gun owner's part [chuckle chuckle]
You can thank ABC News for empirically disproving that particular slander, at least as far as Republicans and gun owners intersect (proving something I'd believed for a very long time) - but there is something about guns...

...no. Not about guns. Guns are like power tools - finely-crafted metal objects that bring out the toy geek in lots of boys and, by the end of Yoffe's article, quite a few girls too.

But shooting, itself - the act of going to the range, setting out your targets, loading up, blasting off a magazine, and repeating the process - it's...

...nothing like sex. Sex is pheremones and emotion and casting irrationality to the wind. Shooting is adrenaline, logic and technique. Different hormones, different frame of mind, different everything. The only thing they have in common? A day at the range busting caps in paper targets is the second-best stress relief there is.

And yet, Yoffe notices something else:

Before I slinked back to my now-embarrassing Volvo, I stopped to watch two men shooting. They were fast and fluid and the targets shattered one after another. I am happily married, but I found myself thinking these two—whose faces I couldn't even make out—were awfully attractive. It brought to mind a newspaper article from a few years back. After the death of Hugh Culverhouse Sr., the owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his various entanglements caused his widow to sue his estate. During the court proceedings, it was revealed that Culverhouse had an affair with the wife of a now-deceased television anchor. Culverhouse's son testified that the caretaker of his father's ranch told him that the caretaker would escort the anchor's wife and Culverhouse "into the woods and they would shoot guns and basically have sex." I thought the article was hilarious at the time. Now I understood.
All these years, and I never had a clue. It was all transference. It's the other guys, the victim-disarmament fops, with the hang-ups. They are the ones that need a little, dare I say it, Firepower Healing.

They can then know, as many of us on the right do, that there are few things in the world hotter than a woman with a shotgun...

...aimed at a target, of course.

Anyway - read the whole thing.

Posted by Mitch at November 23, 2004 10:58 AM | TrackBack
Comments

This piece is absolutly rich in insight into the left's veiw of guns. Here, in the words of a Volvo drivin', NPR listenin' liberal we find out that:

1. Everything she knows about guns she got from the movies.

2. An NRA member must keep it secret lest his child be kicked out of school!

3. Washington D.C. has the strictest gun laws, but the highest murder rate.

4. Because of these laws, guns are considered a very desireable and cool contraband by criminals.

5. Once she got a real education about firearms, and learned how to shoot in a proper environment, all of the sudden, guns didn't seem so evil.

This is "progressive" thinking at it's finest.

Posted by: Rob at November 23, 2004 03:58 PM

Unrelated to topic at hand, but Mitch, what radio station were you a talk show host on? I have been listening (if not listening then at least paying attention) to KSTP since 1991 thru the present (well, except up until Jason Lewis left, at which time I pretty much switched exclusively to the Patriot, unless it's Praeger or Hugh is boring). Not to be rude, but I never heard of you until this past summer when I discovered blogs thanks to Hugh and heard about the Northern Alliance from him.

Where/when were you on the air?

Posted by: FJBill at November 24, 2004 12:10 AM

I was at KSTP from 1985-1987. I started as an intern, was a producer for Don Vogel, and had a graveyard-shift weekend show.

I worked at KDWB AM and FM, the 1990-1991 incarnation of WDGY, KFAI, and several stations (KEYJ, KQDJ, KDAK) in North Dakota.

Posted by: mitch at November 24, 2004 01:56 AM

So you were before my time.

You worked with Don Vogel? You lucky bastard. It was a sad day when he passed away. I recorded his broadcast taken over by Soucheray and David Ruth that day.

He was by far the funniest man I've ever heard on the radio, with Phil Hendrie in his short stint at WCCO a distant 2nd.

Posted by: FJBill at November 24, 2004 09:39 AM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?
hi