Combat veterans shoot down NRA ‘fantasy world’ of ‘good guys with guns’
“It’s insane,” Benson said, recalling how his military training exposed the lie behind the most persistent pro-gun argument.
“We put on our issue .45s, and our instructor said, ‘Gentlemen, the first and most important thing you’ve done by putting on that weapon is you’ve increased your chances of being in a gunfight by 100 percent,’” he said. “That’s a lesson that a lot of people don’t get. More guns means more gunfights — and the idea that in a chaotic, pressurized, terrifying situation, they’re going to do the right thing is ridiculous.”
The gun issue, to a great extent, is really not all that complex: a small portion of gun owners buy into the lies told by the NRA to justify their lust for guns and to live in a dramatic fantasy world utterly divorced from reality.
Which should be a harrowing concept given that those fantasy-dwellers account for the a large portion of gun ownership (if one realizes 2/3 of Americans don't own any of the 300 millions guns in this country). They are delusional AND armed to the teeth.
And delusions are very difficult to eliminate.
Combat vets suggest that these people, far from being able to have the fantasized machismo and surgical accuracy they THINK they would have (and about which they blather constantly) would actually panic when the shit hits the fan:
“In chaotic situations, the first thing you know is that the sh*t has hit the fan and you don’t know where the fan is,” said Benson, who served three combat tours in Vietnam later trained elite troops.
“Unless it’s constantly drilled into you, it’s very hard to maintain discipline in those situations,” he told The Nation. “You’re immediately hit with a massive thump of adrenaline. Your mouth begins to taste like copper. You can hear the blood moving in your system. You can even experience a kind of time-warp — and the problem with that kind of state is that conscious thought shuts down because you’ve been taken over by your nervous system, and your nervous system is saying, ‘Holy sh*t, things just got really bad.’”
I am very pleased to hear actual veterans talking about this: I feel this is the proper push-back for increasing gun safety/public safety which HAS been damaged by these gun-fantasy turkeys.
Gun nuts are called this because they are just so nutty - delusional, not factual - in what they think about guns, how important they think guns are, how much they rationalize away the devastation caused by America's slack regulation of guns, yada, yada, yada.
I believe it is important to demolish this belief system to ever have any hope of improving the situation.
It won't be easy but more and more of this kind of message from the troops and other genuine experts is essential in countering the sheer monolithic bullshit of gun mythology.
I'd like to see a campaign of educational public service announcements challenging these myths.
It couldn't hurt.