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Thom's blog
How a Lack of Power and Guns Go Together
The NRA’s brief moment of sanity is over. On Tuesday, the gun group apologized for a statement published on its website that called gun rights protesters in Texas “weird” and “scary.” That statement, which the NRA put out last Friday, came after gun activists in the Lone Star State brought assault rifles into busy restaurants and stores to show off their "open carry rights." For a moment there, it looked like Wayne LaPierre and company were actually being reasonable. But yesterday, the NRA’s director of legislative action, Chris Cox, called back his group’s statement, saying that it wasn’t the NRA’s job to “criticize the lawful behavior of fellow gun owners.”
Since Cox made that apology, there’s been a lot of talk on the progressive side of things about how the NRA can’t escape the influence of the more radical parts of the gun movement - the people who, for whatever reason, want to bring an AR-15 to Chipotle. And while that’s an important discussion to have, it misses the bigger question: Why would anyone feel the need bring an AR-15 to Chipotle in the first place?
The obvious answer is that America is a gun-obsessed country with a frontier history and that open carry activists are just a small, but vocal, part of a much bigger subculture. But I think it goes deeper than that. Just saying that open carry activists are a symptom of American gun culture doesn’t tells us why they’ve picked right now, the spring of 2014, to protest.
I think this has everything to do with the economy and the destruction of the middle class. For the past thirty-three years, Reaganomics has blown a whole right through the heart of the American dream. Wealthy inequality is near Banana Republic levels, unionization it as at an all-time low, and the American middle class is now the smallest it’s been in decades.
-Thom
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