Lessons of the “baseball shooting”: Gun violence feeds on itself — and even now Republicans won’t listen, the headline at salon.com proclaims. And if that wasn’t enough to signal a dizzying spin on armed self-defense — what does “feeds on itself” mean? — the subhead drives home the anti-gun message . . .
Guns are largely marketed to right-wing male power fantasies, but this latest tragedy shows that no one is immune. In other words, the evil gun industry is so powerful it even seduces liberals! Like this:
The left-wing views of the alleged shooter might be surprising to some, but they shouldn’t be. The gun industry and the National Rifle Association market guns with promises that owning guns will make a customer feel manly and powerful, and that fantasy has a power that can transcend political boundaries.
And no one knows better than gun industry leaders how feelings of political frustration caused by seeing your preferred candidate lose an election can be channeled into a pitch to buy more guns . . .
Gun marketing, helped along by the political messaging of the NRA, , is targeted largely at conservatives. That said, the emotional buttons being pushed — the wish to feel powerful, the desire to prove one’s masculinity, the appeal of violence as a political shortcut — cannot be contained by something as pedestrian as political partisanship.
Through years of marketing and cultural messaging, the appeal of guns has been crafted into something totemic, even primal — desired by all manner of people who yearn for some kind of cleansing violence to solve their problems . . .
Fears of emasculation, racist anxieties about crime, power fantasies about silencing dissent through threats of violence, and a widespread loathing for liberals and their insistence on rational evidence — all these things sell guns.
The majority of regular TTAG fiskee Amanda Marcotte‘s article talks about the threat of gun industry-inspired white Republican proto-violence. “Proto” because Ms. Marcotte can’t dredge-up a single example of a right wing shooter taking down liberal pols.
But there you have it: another anti-gun rights writer divorced from reality whose idée fixe prevents her from understanding even the most basic truth about guns. Same as it ever was.