armed liberal

It’s not politically correct for one as left-leaning as I am to admit to owning guns. I do, though. Lots of them. I didn’t come to this point on my own, though I was brought up in the home of a WWII vet, a gun collector, who took me with him to Saturday morning target practice at the VFW.

There I learned how to handle a gun, how to clean it, how to be safe. I was just a child, but there was none of the nervous nelly “what about the children???” attitude we get these days. Guns were a fact of my life growing up. At 17, a newly wild-eyed radical, I donned the full cloak of hard left liberalism, including the mandatory abhorrence of weaponry, and righteously insisted that all guns should be confiscated or, at the very least, registered to death.

In the last 15 years, I’ve changed. It started when I went with my partner to Wyoming, where all of his relatives were packing pistols. It was a culture shock and I drew myself up in my good liberal outrage, clambered to the top of smug mountain and expressed my displeasure. They looked at me as if I were mad and shook their heads and continued going armed into the world.

A few years later, at a loss for a birthday gift, I bought my sweetheart a Colt .38 Special and a box of bullets. A Wyoming boy, he felt more secure with a gun in the house. Over time, more guns came: rifles, shotguns, more pistols. I now have pistols in my warehouse, where I often work alone at night in the back of the building, 300 feet from any door. The fact of it, having a gun handy, allowed me to eject one of the crackheads who occasionally come looking for work. Most of them I hire, but this one turned aggressive and violent almost immediately and I was glad ~ yes, glad ~ to have a gun nearby that I could use to make him move.

Do you think that’s insane? I am as far left as they come. I am a socialist. I capture bugs in my house and take them outside. I bring tidbits for the little mouse that lives in the corner of my warehouse office. I provided food and water to the skunk that lived under my house one winter so he could survive until I could open up the crawlspace again.

For a long time, though, owning guns wasn’t inconsistent with liberal views. Hubert Humphrey told us repeatedly that guns have a place in the home because governments have a habit of oppressing people. “The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”

Joe Bageant, writer of Deer Hunting with Jesus, writes:

Across rural and small-town AMerica any kind of gun control is seen as an attempt to take away citizens’ rights to protect home and hearth from the crazies and, increasingly, from an authoritarian government. Most of the people at Fort Shenandoah see gun ownership in this light ~ as a way of stopping the jackboots at their own front doors. Given what we’ve seen lately, I’m not so sure I don’t agree with them. Of all the issues ~ gay marriage, abortion, affirmative action, animal rights ~ that have split American liberalism up into the honking gaggle of issue and identity cults it has become, gun ownership is the one that touches the lives of the most heartland voters. It reaches nearly everyone, even those who do not own guns. The right to do so rings liberty bells for them.

And why not? With Michael Savage and Ann Coulter openly calling for putting liberals in concentration camps, with the CIA now licensed to secretly detain American citizens indefinitely, and with the current administration effectively legalizing torture, the proper question to askan NRA member these days may be, “What kind of assault rifle do you think I can get for three hundred bucks, and how many rounds of ammo does it take to stop a two-hundred-pound born-again Homeland Security zombie from putting me in a camp?” Which would you prefer, 40 million gun-owning Americans on your side or theirs?

I will tell you that I still have a visceral revulsion to the NRA. I haven’t come so far that I embrace those zealots. Gun shows, and those who attend them, freak me out. But increasingly I am glad that I’m armed. And increasingly, I’m finding that many of the justifications I have ~ my very own self ~ spouted against gun ownership are not exactly accurate.

Maybe, just maybe, we liberals have been brainwashed on this issue and it keeps us divided. And that divide is deadly to democracy. We have to find a way to come together on guns because it is still, and I tell you this from Oklahoma, a major issue in ensuring that the Republicans continue to get rural and southern folks to vote entirely against economic self interest: Liberals want to take their guns.

Bageant suggests that accidental gun deaths are rare and hardly epidemic. Those 13 child deaths a day include teenagers who are shooting each other over turf and dope (and no, that’s not okay, but resolving the societal issues that lead to such lives probably doesn’t start with collecting weapons). Armed citizens actually have a better track record of safety than the police and where concealed carry laws have gone into effect, crime rates have gone down in areas where crime was most rampant. Not surprisingly, it’s women ~ primarily poor, urban women ~ and the poor in general who benefit most from concealed carry.

So there you are. This socialist’s view of guns. Given the powerful nature of this issue to divide liberals from regular folks who agree with our economic views but won’t give up their steel, maybe it’s time to take another look at it. That doesn’t mean every liberal ought to be packing a pistol (though in these frightening times of newly constructed mass detention centers and a government out of control, it might not be a bad idea). But maybe we don’t need to be quite so quick to condemn those who do.