Actually, two points. I won’t cover the common points, or those spoken by me before here.
People tell me that Americans are hypocrites when they say that their guns are intended for defense, given the number of offenses committed with them. I disagree.
The War to End All Wars, a name given to World War I, is a curious turn of phrase. I suspect what is imagined is a Final War, a decisive war that sorts everything out for all time. What is imagined is a utopia (dystopia?) of warlessness following.
Using a gun ends the situation that led up to the gun use. Again we receive the imagery of the moral old west, where honor was upheld (seemingly as often as possible) with gunfire, ending otherwise harmful situations.
Guns are seen as moral agents. That is to say, human death is preferable to the withstanding of immorality, or evil. Call it a choice… a prioritizing.
Charlton Heston is perfect in bearing witness to this point, and moving into the other point. He’s self-righteous (nauseatingly so to those sensitive to it). He’s strident, zealous.
He encapsulates the issue. He feels that through gun use he is achieving morality. He puts an end to evil. Guns are not only necessary, their use is often a glorious achievement, at least when in the right hands and circumstances.
Or, to put it into gaming terms, its about saving the world one corpse at a time.
Corpses, thus, become not a crime, not even a problem, but the good outcome to evil. Corpsification is what happens to bad people as a result of good people with guns.
This whole process must be actively engaged. See evil, kill evil. The classic example of the “intruder breaking into the home being shot to death”. This is GLORIFIED in America, even if its hidden and repressed in the mind. Nowhere else does this glorification occur.
The problem, or at least one big problem, is the lack of any real reason to believe that the people who THINK they are the good ones, the ones who are bearing arms against the evil onslaught that could occur at any moment, are actually the good ones. Given the constant errors that humans make they are supposed to be entrusted with THIS kind of insight? Sorry if I don’t see vast morality at the heart of Charlton Heston.
Another probably bigger problem is with the dual system of good and evil that underlies it. Shades of Gray calling America, come in America. Sorry to confuse your simple worldview, you fucking moron.
The issue gets even more difficult, however. Its not a matter of calling conservatives dumbasses and moving on, as Rucker or McCullough or Anaxagoras or Euri or countless others would have you think.
The project is, after all, noble. Its an attempt to make morality a living creation, an emergent property out of murder and the threat of murder. Lets take a look at this for the moment…
The KKK was a group whose goal was the establishment and perpetuation of emotional and social slavery to replace the destruction of legal slavery. They disagreed with the abolishment of the slavery laws, and sought to recreate that environment as closely as possible, or expel blacks as a sort of Plan B.
The Mafia is a group whose goal is the establishment of a secret or alternate government with intent to support/exploit the space between the law of the majority government and the will of its citizens.
It might be strange to think of the KKK and the Mafia as moral, but from their own perspectives they’re moral (negative media manipulation on both groups notwithstanding), which is no different logically from Charlton Heston itching to exert his own moral imperative as a result of a fortunate intruder soon to be corpseified.
If you notice, Liberals kind of like the Mafia. The Youth REALLY like the Mafia… these youth are the children of the Baby Boomers who are anti-establishment (or were and enjoy reliving their glory days through their children) and the Mafia are in any case an alternative to the primary establishment.
What this all really boils down to is the creative effect of murder. Whether making the world a better place by gunning down a burglar or making the world a better place by subjugating niggers or making the world a better place by filling the holes in people’s lives with an alternate government, murder is one of the means of making this happen, (guns are often the most convenient and dramatic method of murder), and according to the people engaged in it, its usually a small price to pay.
I’ve heard all the common liberal and conservative theories (mostly liberal ones of course) about why there are so many gun murders and guns in America, yet I’ve never heard what I just proposed. The answer to Why? is not found in the horrible stupidity, strange newness, or incredible insight of my proposition, for none of those exist, but rather in the simple fact that Liberals are afraid of discussing murder in any light other than complete negativity and Conservatives are afraid of themselves, to the point of self-righteous blindness illustrated by Heston. Thus neither is available for comment, leaving me the entire floor to myself.