Tim Carney: Liberals use gun control to claim cultural superiority
By Timothy P. Carney March 13, 2013 | 7:00 pm
Gun control efforts are largely a culture-war offensive by liberals who dislike the parts of America that own guns and love guns. This meddling motivation shines through in the rhetoric of gun control advocates and in the laws they push.
For many gun owners, the firearm is not merely a tool for the practical purpose of self-defense. Nor is it simply recreational equipment, like a golf club. It's a cultural signifier, and a totem of a worldview.
For many gun owners, the firearm is not merely a tool for the practical purpose of self-defense. Nor is it simply recreational equipment, like a golf club. It's a cultural signifier, and a totem of a worldview.
Dan Baum, a Jewish liberal who wears turtlenecks but also owns guns, writes in his new book, "Gun Guys," that firearms in America have long represented "a worldview that, broadly defined, valued the individual over the collective, vigorous outdoorsiness over pallid intellectualism, certainty over questioning ... "
The gun's symbolism is strong for the gun culture, and it's just as strong for the gun control culture. Recall how liberals have argued for gun laws since the Sandy Hook massacre last December.
Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball," asserted that gun rights advocates aren't "normal people," they have no "other interests," and they are uninterested in their wives or kids.
After Sandy Hook, when liberals wrote and spoke about guns and geography, rather than about on poverty-filled cities where gun violence is concentrated, they typically focused on the South. "The South is the most violent region in the United States," a Washington Post article proclaimed.
Congressman Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., said in January, "Some of the southern areas have cultures that we have to overcome."
MSNBC contributor Joy Reid wrote on Twitter in December that she was "getting a little tired of this meme that we have to have the rural South's permission to legislate on guns. The Union won. Get over it."
Wherever they live, gun owners are unwashed, flag-waving, philistines -- at least in the eyes of many liberals.
The Post's Gene Weingarten in 2011 spat on the Second Amendment as "the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches."
After Columbine, a Boston Herald op-ed described the average participant in a 1999 Boston Common pro-gun rally as a wannabe "hicksville cowboy, as in way out there, somewhere off the Mass Pike or at the far reaches of 93. From towns with something to prove and lots of Amvets posts."
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