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AN APOLOGY TO GAMERS, and, EXPOSING THE TAWDRINESS of GUN CULTS

12/20/2012

4 Comments

 
            An Apology to Gamers, and, Exposing the Tawdriness of Gun Cults
    In my last post (below Seedy, etc), I compared video gamers to gun cultists. It’s not fair. When not corrupted by flying body parts, gaming demands brains, coordination, and develops transferrable skills.  Some offer intellectual challenge, even beauty. I humbly ask such gamers to forgive my hasty comparison of their interest with the empty, useless, life-destroying obsession of gun cults.

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Seedy, Sordid, Antisocial
    Movies of the 1940s and 50s, gave cigarettes sleek PR. A soldier comforts a wounded comrade: “Have a cigarette, it will make you feel better.” Stars blow smoke at each other. Producers get paid by tobacco companies who hide secret research proving that their product causes cancer. Death is not allowed to interfere with profits.
    But smoking fell off when its image changed from Humphrey Bogart to Ozzie Schlemozzle, from Marlene Dietrich to Tilly Schlob. Today’s smokers are helpless addicts who pay 10 bucks a pack to puff forlornly on sidewalks outside office buildings. One feels pity, even sympathy, but not a shred of admiration, Who wants to be like that? The same can happen to gun cultists.
    Walter Mitty and Casper Milquetoast, scared of their shadows, imagine themselve to be brave warriors if they buy a Hummer. Gun cultists think they’re Daniel Boone or Annie Oakley if they fire an AR-15 at a target, or unspeakably, at an animal. Their self-serving narrative is pure fiction, and, to put it plainly, horse shit.
    But fiction can harden into myth, and myth is powerful, so I have little hope that the atrocity in Newtown, CT, will much reduce gun violence, even if laws are passed. But one thing will, destruction of their false self-glorifying image.
    Recent polling shows that 78% of NRA members favor gun control, but the NRA, paid off by manufacturers, fights every effort to regulate. It may be immoral and dangerous to sell AR-15s to the general public, but hey! they’re going like hotcakes.
    Powerful and wise people, Michael Bloomberg, for one, are publicly committed to reducing gun deaths. I hope it includes de-glamorizing. We need a campaign to show that gun nuts are as glamorous as child abusers, as mindless as drive-by shootings, as manly as stuffed body bags.
    Start with a truer-to-life Rambo poster, killer bees and jungle bugs covering his bare torso, ammunition belt around his knees, gun discharging like the seed of Onan, into the ground. Then there’s drama; how about a gun cult in a small Connecticut town that makes life miserable for everyone, defies the chief of police, and pays off the Town Council?  Tommy Lee Jones can play the chief, and he really gets 'em! 


4 Comments
 


urbisoler
12/20/2012 18:00

Stuart - Isn't this the equivalent of alcohol Prohibition? It didn't work and the problem is even worse now than then. And everytime something like this happens and the uproar for more gun control echoes throughout the land, the public runs to the nearest gun store and gobbles up everything in sight. And NRA memberships skyrocket. (PS I am not a member) There is a recent website that illustrates that the US is not nearly the worst offenders on the planet. Check out:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html
But, go ahead, ban guns. Somebody is already at work writing the definitive "Rise and Fall of the late great United State(sic)" and I feel certain universal gun control will be a significant chapter.
Ciao!

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r
12/21/2012 09:24

lived in the hills of vt for 5 yrs...and the locals do love their guns . its like their truck-love.(never enough rough and tough features).
....many were poor and did look foward to hunting season for extra food, but it might have been just as cheap to go to the A&P.
they wore orange gear, but still, you had to post your land at all 4 corners if you didn,t want them on your land. (by the way, half came up from the mass suburbs to "play hunter" those were the scary ones)
no one ever got shot except a deer. it was the stories of violence in the cities that freaked them out : the locals mostly never saw a blackman or inner city tough, except on tv....and always were very sure to be respectful in tone, telling you...." that they had nothing against them"...but, it was the rich flatlanders who they had sold their land to cheap that they really hated -because they could of got twice as much a few years later.
...as i remember, they hated arnold schwartzenegger. not because he killed people, but because he was a gerri.... (many of the old times told stories of guns and "killen the gerris", and how they saw their guns as friends or lovers.

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    Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

    Being 90 years in this world,  with great kids,  great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
                                   Stuart Hodes

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           With my friend, Nero.
                   April, 2012.
        Photo by Ray Madrigal

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