TruthOut10
Active Member
- Dec 3, 2012
- 627
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From global warming to gun safety, status loss trumps all else in the 'white male effect'.
As US Vice President Joe Biden was casting a wide net, talking to a broad range of stakeholders, and hearing a full spectrum of suggestions about how to respond to America's epidemic of gun violence, the NRA once again set itself starkly apart by mischaracterising the broad diversity of ideas entertained as antithetical to Sarah Palin's "real Americans", whining angrily that "this task force spent most of its time on proposed restrictions on lawful firearms owners - honest, taxpaying, hardworking Americans".
It's a narrative strategy the gunowners has long relied on, but it's deeply deceptive at best, in at least two important ways. First - and most obviously - it's deceptive because most of what's being proposed falls into the category of ideas that I discussed previously here, which are supported by a majority of gun-owners - ideas that most gunowners themselves do not see as restricting them in any meaningful sense. They are proud to act responsibly - passing background checks when buying guns, for example - and would like to see everyone else act responsibly as well. But the second deeper deception concerns who the real victims are - not the 20 dead children in Newtown and the brave women who died protecting them, but rather, the "honest, taxpaying, hardworking Americans" who the NRA rather dubiously claims as its own - and who implicitly stand diametrically opposed to the 47 percent of "takers" that Mitt Romney so casually wrote off in his failed presidential bid.
This deeper deception is all the more potent because, although literally false, it expresses a symbolic truth - those the NRA speaks for really do feel like victims, and there are even valid reasons why they feel that way (this sense of heroic victimhood was echoed by other extremist voices which I'll touch on below, such as Matt Drudge comparing Obama to Hitler, Ted Nugent comparing gun-owners to Rosa Parks, and Larry Ward, chairman of Gun Appreciation Day, invoking Martin Luther King as a would-be "gun rights" advocate). But the solutions that the NRA offers them are no solutions at all - which, by the way, may help explain why the NRA's extremist positions have such limited support among gun-owners generally.
The fears of fearless white men - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
As US Vice President Joe Biden was casting a wide net, talking to a broad range of stakeholders, and hearing a full spectrum of suggestions about how to respond to America's epidemic of gun violence, the NRA once again set itself starkly apart by mischaracterising the broad diversity of ideas entertained as antithetical to Sarah Palin's "real Americans", whining angrily that "this task force spent most of its time on proposed restrictions on lawful firearms owners - honest, taxpaying, hardworking Americans".
It's a narrative strategy the gunowners has long relied on, but it's deeply deceptive at best, in at least two important ways. First - and most obviously - it's deceptive because most of what's being proposed falls into the category of ideas that I discussed previously here, which are supported by a majority of gun-owners - ideas that most gunowners themselves do not see as restricting them in any meaningful sense. They are proud to act responsibly - passing background checks when buying guns, for example - and would like to see everyone else act responsibly as well. But the second deeper deception concerns who the real victims are - not the 20 dead children in Newtown and the brave women who died protecting them, but rather, the "honest, taxpaying, hardworking Americans" who the NRA rather dubiously claims as its own - and who implicitly stand diametrically opposed to the 47 percent of "takers" that Mitt Romney so casually wrote off in his failed presidential bid.
This deeper deception is all the more potent because, although literally false, it expresses a symbolic truth - those the NRA speaks for really do feel like victims, and there are even valid reasons why they feel that way (this sense of heroic victimhood was echoed by other extremist voices which I'll touch on below, such as Matt Drudge comparing Obama to Hitler, Ted Nugent comparing gun-owners to Rosa Parks, and Larry Ward, chairman of Gun Appreciation Day, invoking Martin Luther King as a would-be "gun rights" advocate). But the solutions that the NRA offers them are no solutions at all - which, by the way, may help explain why the NRA's extremist positions have such limited support among gun-owners generally.
The fears of fearless white men - Opinion - Al Jazeera English