A couple of weeks ago, Sadie Baker made the following comment in a diary by Chris:
The NRA is a money laundering operation for arms dealers. They pay Congress to keep gun laws loose so they can sell guns to criminals, and then sell guns to people who are afraid of criminals. It is a bottomless pit of money. Our side has never had, and never will have, a similar source of revenue.
"Not a new thought, but a far too-uncommon one--and SO well expressed," I wrote to her, and asked her to elaborate about how came to see this so clearly. In response, she wrote:
The way I figured this out is because of the gunshow loophole. And I became aware of the gunshow loophole when I had a friend going through a divorce. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband was a convicted felon who always had as many guns as he wanted, and it was a scary time. From my friend I learned that her husband bought guns at gunshows, and from individuals (one of them a marshal!) and sometimes from ads in the paper or on ebay. I realized that rhetoric to the contrary, there are no gun laws worth speaking of in this country.
Everything else comes from stuff I read, and of course now I can't lay my hands on exactly what I read when or where. But to summarize:
Gun manufacturers do market research the same as every other manufacturer in the world. They know that the legitimate market for their product in the US is x, yet they consistently produce something like 3x, why?
The store that sold the DC sniper his guns had been under investigation for years because the owner kept "losing" guns and having them "stolen," consistently, yet the ATF was helpless to shut him down because the laws required him to be given second chance after second chance.
If you talk to any gun afficiando anywhere, they always claim their arsenals are for protection. They need them because criminals have guns! Also they oppose any sort of sensible gun laws because they "know" criminals will get guns anyway, and only honest people like themselves will be disarmed.
They even oppose things like fingerprinting guns, on the argument that "criminals will file the borings away," nevermind the fact that most burglars don't wear gloves and most rapists don't use condoms. In other words, although most criminals can protect themselves from basic forensics they still don't. And we don't [use] that as an argument to take away other kinds of forensics. So who does the lack of fingerprinting protect, anyway? Not honest people since they aren't the ones commiting crimes. The only ones it protects are the dirty dealers who knowingly and deliberately sell to criminals.
Then I ran across someone somewhere who called the NRA "the gun manufacturers lobby" and it clicked.
This is a great example of plain old common sense thinking that virtually impossible because of rightwing hegemony--hegemony defined as "ideology in drag as common sense." To put it more exactly, it's an example of how hegemony displaces and replaces common sense, and it does so by creating a fantasy world, which has its own common sense.
The fantasy is a powerful one, because it's all tangled up in male sexual insecurity, which goes right to the core of male identity. And, of course, you can't talk about that, because the insecurity is extreme that it can't tolerate the least little chance of being looked at. But you can talk about the material mechanism by which the fears are stoked that feed on that insecurity to make it a major, debilitating aspect of our nation's political economy. And that's just what Sadie did.
I've often encountered people who say that liberals need to get over it, and that gun-owners often agree with us on everything except guns.
But that's like saying that Lieberman is with us on everything but the war. For one thing, liberals as a whole have never really been about taking away people's guns in the way the NRA propaganda would have it. The "R" in NRA stands for "rifle", as in hunting rifle, a part of rural culture. But a classic gun control group is Handgun Control--focused on an urban crime problem. Two completely different matters.
Of course, they aren't different for the NRA, because "The NRA is a money laundering operation for arms dealers." But the gunowners who support the NRA are its dupes--and are such because it knows so well how to play on their insecurities, and those ontological insecurities are far more important to them than any of the other issues that they may agree with us on.
The most important thing about anyone's politics is not their position on any one issue. The most important thing about anyone's politics is what fantasy they are living in--and why.
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