The militia movement, a movement of violent racist Biffs who organized their very lives around the notion that they would someday need to kill their fellow Americans in gaudily large numbers and would be hailed as heroes once they had done it, moved out of fringe cult status and into the realm of communicable disease, something the new NRA leaders would spread like syphilis to a nation of Biffs feeling thoroughly emasculated by new rules putting new limits on how racist and sexist a Biff could be, on the street or in the lunchroom, before the courts would get involved.
It was the money that led to everything else; once the National Rifle Association put their fortune toward the syphilitic militia version of "gun rights," it took little time for lawmakers to start repeating the same refrains. The ones that would not were disposed with. So now it is the militia version of "gun rights" that is the defining version, the one predicated on the need for assembling roving militias on a moment’s notice and on the God-given right of every last Biff to be his own one-man militia, if he sees a non-deferential teen boy carrying a pack of Skittles in a non-deferential way, and render immediate sidewalk judgment on the child who has thereby enraged him.
That is the short version, anyway. The longer version would add notes about rangeland Biffs of a certain sort and their firm belief that they, by nebulous right, are the only true heirs to their dibs-called federal lands and are therefore entitled to shoot at every other human, government-employed or day hiker, who might set foot on them. It would include the brief bit in which sacrosanct gun “rights” were hurriedly carved up—by Ronald Reagan Himself, no less—when black Americans began to show up with rifles in the same manner previously deemed to be a show of earnest patriotism when white Americans had done it, and would probe the long modern history of the NRA using the imagined threat of armed black Americans coming toward your neighborhood as a primary reason armed white Americans need to not just own guns, but stockpile them in ever-greater quantities and be privileged with newly slackened laws defining new rules of engagement that consisted, for the most part, of if I feel like it.
It would sketch out the weird pseudo-religious origins of the whole sorry enterprise, the campfire stories told in every magazine of an encroaching armageddon in which government will collapse, non-white Americans will roam the streets looking for food that the Good White People have stored in their bunkers (an invariably ultra-racist reimagining of the tale of the Ant and the Grasshopper) and the most current of international enemies (once the Soviet Union, now China or Cuba or the massive private armies of international climate research—it makes not a bit of difference) seizes the opportunity to capture Biff Meadows, the small-town jewel of Biff County, as foretold by the ammunition-sellers' third-quarter prophecies.
But the core of it is that it is not guns themselves that have embedded so deeply into the American soul, but a national obsession with "good" murder, and an absolute conviction that the Day of Good Murder is forever creeping closer, and closer still, and in that inevitable future moment it is the Biff with the most guns who will win the day. That is what the United States has that Australia or New Zealand or Europe lack: a newly modernized cultural identity in which the law is whatever the most-armed person says it is. You do not merely have a right to own a gun. You have an absolute right to pull the trigger, whenever you like, and let God and a courtroom sort out the remaining details.
If it is incomprehensible, then good. That means you have not contracted the prion disease, and your personal civilization remains intact. Would that all of us were so lucky.
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