Guns and Hippies

A few thoughts in the wake of last
week's massacre.

Whether you call it “extreme gun
ownership” or “gun fetishism,” the attitudes behind the mother
who bought these weapons are common on the American right today.

Many people are struggling to put this
new attitude into context, and explain it to foreigners, but my own
writing gives you a frame.

These are hippies. And what happened
last week, what is happening across the country as these incidents
spiral, is very similar to what happened with the “leftist kids”
in the wake of of 1968. Kid who'd been innocently tripping out on pot
turned to harder stuff, they turned to cocaine and heroin. A lot of
them died. 

In our time, guns are what drugs were
then. They're a symbol, they're a totem, they represent freedom,
defiance of “the man,” and big arsenals are what make true
believers different, “better” in their own view, than their more
passive neighbors.

We know what happened with drugs. I
think the same thing is happening with guns. Overdoses and death. As
a result our attitudes are going to gradually harden toward guns
going forward, just as they hardened toward drugs, so that an
abandonment of guns becomes the entry point for being part of
civilized society. Maybe, they'll say 40 years ago, someone
experimented with guns in their youth, but they'd better have
renounced it thoroughly before becoming a responsible adult or,
having been “outed,” they'll be destroyed by it.

The kinds of arsenals that are now all
too common represent hard drugs. And they are a drug to those who own
them, they're sold to them like drugs by the gun companies. Whenever
something happens that scares the right – Obama's election, Obama's
re-election – there's a rush to the gun shops. We've seen this. Why
is it? Fear. Fear is a powerful motivator, which leads to getting
more-and-more of the gun drug. The only people getting rich are the
pushers. The NRA isn't a political organization – it's a trade
group of drug makers. It's a cartel.

People with big arsenals, who “get
off” on firing guns every weekend, need to be seen for what they
are. They're addicts. They need to be treated as addicts. And those
who've become addicted to guns can only recover by going cold turkey,
by getting rid of all their guns, and giving themselves over to a
higher power than guns.