Guns are largely marketed to right-wing male power fantasies, but this latest tragedy shows that no one is immune VIDEO
Wednesday’s demonstrated that no one is protected from the violence that plagues a country where gun industry profits and culture-war politics have turned guns into fetish objects and have made reasonable gun safety policies nearly impossible to enact. No one is spared, not even those who have done so much to make it easy for any madman with a vendetta to get the weaponry he needs to rain the sort of havoc that was visited on a bucolic park in Alexandria, Virginia, in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Early reports indicate that the suspect, who was apparently shot and killed by police, was a 66-year-old Illinois man named James T. Hodgkinson. His social media presence was almost wholly devoted to loathing Donald Trump and exalting Sen. Bernie Sanders, and reports have suggested he worked as a volunteer for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. The left-wing views of the alleged shooter might be surprising to some, but they shouldn’ t be. The gun industry and the NRA market guns with promises that owning guns will make the 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 candidates lose elections can be channeled into a pitch to buy more guns. Exactly a year ago today, in response to the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando that left 49 people dead, that touched on how the gun industry uses political grievances as a hook to convince people to buy more guns. Back then, of course, we had a Democratic president in office. During Barack Obama’s administration, the gun industry was able to move huge numbers of weapons off the shelf by convincing paranoid, resentful white conservatives that the black president was coming to take their guns away. This is not conjecture. Last year, celebrating the effect that having a Democrat in the White House — which provokes feelings of resentment and frustration in conservative voters — had on their gun sales. This is a slide from the company’s own report. The election of President Trump empowered conservative Americans. That, too, the “Trump slump.” With Trump in office sticking it to the liberals, the main gun customer base, angry reactionaries, has been less inclined to dump thousands of dollars of overcompensation money on deadly hardware. Gun marketing, particularly through the NRA, is targeted largely at conservatives. That said, the emotional buttons being pushed — that 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, guns have been crafted into something totemic, even primal, in their appeal, and that appeal extends to all manner of people who yearn for some kind of cleansing violence to solve their problems. Around the time of Trump’s inauguration, a debate rose up in leftist circles about the value of political violence, particularly after an anonymous person on Inauguration Day. While I strongly relate to the desire to lash out at people who would dismantle our democracy in the name of white nationalism, I’ ve been persuaded by friends and allies, especially, that political violence is always a bad idea. Not only is it wrong but it tends to backfire, creating the pretext for the violent suppression of liberal or leftist ideas.
