Remember the move “Red Dawn”? Not the crap-tastic waste of film they put out last November, but the original 1984 version. It starred Patrick Swayze and a young Charlie Sheen as leaders of a group of teens who fight off invading Soviet forces. The movie is pretty much a wet-dream for conservative hawks and right wing conspiracy theorists (Glenn Beck probably stores it with his porn collection). It’s just the kind of fantasy scenario that gun-nuts are absolutely obsessed with, the fantasy of fighting an invading army, or a tyrannical government, against impossible odds and emerging victorious. Well, strictly speaking, the kids in the movie weren’t very triumphant, and realistically speaking, neither would the gun nuts in a similar situation.
Gun nuts have always been a rather unstable lot in their desire to survive the coming apocalypse that exists solely in their paranoid delusions. But since the Sandy Hook shootings, they have advanced to near conniption fits with the idea that the President is coming for their guns (and their Bibles). Fed by folks like Alex Jones and the NRA, these people truly believe that they are capable of waging a sustained successful Civil War against the government should it decide to ban assault weapons…because it worked out so well for the last group of pissed off rebels that tried it.
Now before I go any further, let me clarify. I don’t believe that everyone who owns a gun is a “gun nut”. There are very responsible gun owners out there who genuinely want to protect their home and their family, as well as those who use guns for hunting. I would no more deny them their right to own a gun than I would deny myself the right to not own one. But the thing that separates the gun-nuts from responsible gun owners is their failure to recognize one very simple fact. That is, if President Obama actually decided to go all Idi Amin and order a nationwide house to house seizure of every gun in America, there’d be absolutely nothing Alex Jones, the NRA, or the people who hang on their every word could do to stop him.
Right now there is some of our United States Military stationed somewhere on literally every continent on the globe, including Antarctica. As of 2007 over 1.7 million Americans serve in our military, and they have access to an unlimited supply of…guess what…GUNS. The very kind of guns, in fact, that gun-nuts genuinely feels they have a God given right to have for themselves, the kind that are designed for the sole purpose of killing a lot of people in a very little amount of time. In addition to guns, our military has tanks, missiles, fighter jets, unmanned drones, and, of course, the grand prize -- nuclear launch codes. As Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces, President Obama has ALL of this at his disposal. Yet, gun nuts believe that they have a better shot against today’s military than the rebels of the south had against a much less advanced Union army…and we know how that story turned out.
The right-wing in this country have this grand romantic notion about war, be it the Civil War, the revolutionary war, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, probably because most of them, like most of us, have never actually had to fight in a war. Furthermore, most of them, like most of us, have never been faced with having to take a life, and for all of the smack-talk probably couldn’t if they had to, or even wanted to. Our military, on the other hand, is more than capable of killing, because they’re trained to do so, quite efficiently and effectively, I might add. They’re also trained to follow the orders of the Commander in Chief, regardless of how they might feel about him personally. This fantasy that gun-nuts harbor about our military rebelling against the President because they don’t like what he’s doing is exactly that…a fantasy. It will never, ever happen. And even if it did, the President wouldn’t need them any way. He could simply launch a couple of unmanned drones to take out these gun nuts before they could get out of their Hov-a-round scooters. The right also likes to cling to the fantasy that somehow the law and the Constitution would stop the President if he were to suddenly launch an armed campaign to take their guns. The logical -- and frankly terrifying -- reality is that if the President were actually that far-gone, there would be no law, no government, no constitution, and no democracy. All of us, liberals and conservatives both, would be in a word…screwed.
Now, of course, the sane majority of America, even those who own and use guns for recreation, know that there is absolutely no way this is going to happen. The President is not coming for their guns (or their Bibles) either via legislation or armed agression. You know who else knows this, the NRA. But the NRA has no argument to counter the country’s growing desire for real comprehensive gun control. So they have to keep up this idiot conspiracy theory that Obama is waging a “War on Whitey” for the purpose of taking their guns away. And for the sake of keeping the cash flowing from the galacticly stupid within their membership, they must also keep alive the fantasy that they’d actually have a snowball’s prayer in Hell of winning if the President was intent on waging such a war. They need to do this because they need to make money so they can continue to lobby for the gun industry. And what better fools to part from their money than a bunch of paranoid rubes spoiling for a fight against the big scary Black guy who they’re terrified is going to lead an army of Mau Maus to usurp their rights and invoke Shariah Law. And every day this doesn’t happen, every day that Obama doesn’t send troops to confiscate everyone’s guns, is another day that this country becomes more and more convinced that he should. The irony is that the people making the best case for gun control…are the gun-nuts themselves.
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