The “alternative” newspaper in Boise, The Boise Weekly, has an article in this week’s issue entitled “A Fistful of Bullets - The Western Flavor of the modern Gun-Rights Movement”. For my out of Boise readers, The Weekly is a mildly amusing, often useful (for events calendar type uses), but more frequently annoying example of what the old hippie papers of the 1960’s used to be have become. Remember the Seattle Helix? The Village Voice? Avatar? Or any of the other hippie street rags with names that often included the words “Free Press” in the name? The Boise Weekly is a present day incarnation of those papers, tastefully grey haired (or the children of), with a little money, and that hip/urban arty/environmental/outdoor/liberal attitude one finds especially associated with college towns (which Boise is, in case you missed the bowl games last January).
Given that source, this is an interesting article.
TWIN FALLS, IDAHO—As 7 p.m. approaches, the high-desert sunlight lingers with a golden hue and 80 degree warmth, favoring the people who pull their vehicles into the downtown lot by the Lamphouse Theater. Disembarking and filing into the movie theater, they appear to be a Western cross-section: carefully stepping gray-haired ladies, a guy in an electric wheelchair, a few sweet little girls, the vice mayor, a toddler clinging to a mother’s shoulder, two doctors and the inevitable guy wearing camo pants.
Sounds like a cross-section of Weekly readers. And, don’t look now, but camo in Idaho is a pretty common wardrobe item at any time of the year, not only for the large hunting crowd, but also among many of the young folks. Camo is not sinister, nor does it indicate anything in particular in this state. Now a Che T-shirt, a “peace scarf”, or an ELF bumpersticker might be noteworthy, but not camo.
The theater is the setting for a rally/fundraiser for Red’s Trading Post. The fundraiser and the briefly told story of the trouble Red’s has had from the BATF these last few years is also the setting for what turns out to be another “gun nuts are weird and probably dangerous” article, with a bonus cameo by “the Jews“. I’m serious. It must have been hard for this writer to hold down what seems like some strong biases. The theater is showing a film called The Gang.
..it was made by a super-hard-line national gun-rights group, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. The group believes the United States government has copied Nazi gun-control laws that disarmed Jews during the Holocaust; it is holding the movie’s national theatrical premiere here tonight, with no admission charge, to reinforce Horsley and Red’s Trading Post in the minds of the locals.
The Gang has the format of a documentary, presenting interviews and other evidence, but really it’s a one-sided attack on the ATF. For 85 minutes, it charges that the ATF operates as a $1 billion “criminal organization,” persecuting innocent gun dealers and gun owners, lying, conspiring with big-government politicians, and even murdering its way toward the goal of taking citizens’ weapons and imposing tyranny upon them.
For some people, guns are like abortion: politics boiled down to a single issue.
Gun-rights absolutists have some reason to be concerned about the course of recent history; there has been an incremental creep toward nationwide gun control. Congress has passed laws in response to spectacular gun violence—first in the 1930s, as organized crime emerged, and then in 1968, 1986, 1993 and 1994, reacting to two race riots in Los Angeles and a wave of assassinations (with President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy killed, and President Ronald Reagan wounded). Some state legislatures have taken their own steps, and gun-control advocacy groups have sprung up. Because of these regulations, which include heavier licensing fees that discourage small gun businesses, in the last 20 years the number of federally licensed gun retailers nationwide has declined by 80 percent, leaving about 50,000 in business today.
Thank you for that. That’s the Weekly’s imitation of Fox’s ‘fair and balanced’. But that’s about enough of that
..But the controls have awakened a powerful gun-rights movement composed not only of the single-minded National Rifle Association (3.6 million members), but also many smaller groups, down to the Wisconsin-based Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (about 6,500 members). This movement has thwarted attempts to pass more laws and rolled back provisions of existing regulations. It has also pushed new, blatantly pro-gun laws—allowing more people to carry concealed guns in more places, for example—while encouraging voters to evaluate political candidates in terms of their position on guns. And the number of civilian guns in the U.S. has continued to increase, topping 250 million now, more than one-third of the world’s total.
The whole gun-rights movement has a Western flavor, invoking the frontier mythology of fast-draw self-defense, says one of the region’s gun-fascinated academics, Jean Burbick, who is a professor of English and American Studies at Washington State University. She studied gun shows and other gun-related events in Idaho, Nevada, Washington and several states outside the region to write her 2006 book, Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy. At a gun show in Illinois, she found piles of Buffalo Bill memorabilia and booths for groups called Cowboy Action Shooting and the Single Action Shooting Society (members dress up like Wyatt Earp to do their blasting). She writes, “The mystique of the Western gun rested on an inflated belief in the individual and the power within reach of an ordinary human being.”
Oh please, not Jean Burbick (actually, I think he means Joan Burbick), who is pretty gun obsessed herself. The article calms down and ranges on, touching on differing state gun laws, gun shows, machine guns, and the National database and registration, before turning once again to the problems that Red’s has had with the ATF. From there it touches on the recent changes in law after the Tech shooting, mentioning increased paperwork for gun transfers (which I understand take effect in a couple days, in September). But just when you think you’re out of the baloney, the article finishes of with some of the most ignorant and racist BS I’ve read in quite awhile.
..In a phone interview, Professor Burbick says the gun-rights movement began not only in reaction to gun laws, but also as a reflection of white men’s anxiety about the civil rights movement. Right-wing politicians have deliberately exploited that anxiety, exaggerating the dangers of government power and of criminals who supposedly target every unarmed person, she says. “The gun has become a fetish—an emotional response to a changing America,” she notes, “the idea that somehow, the social problems of the U.S. will be solved through private gun ownership and a lot more guns.”
‘A reflection of the white men’s anxiety about the civil right movement’… wow. We really ARE all camo-wearing racist skinhead gun-fetishists out here in Idaho, aren’t we? I need to pick up that paper more often… ever since the Weekly World News folded, taking the Bat Boy and the Aliens Meet With Gingrich stories away, I’ve been missing a lot of good stuff! Hippies are a hoot.
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