They don’t call themselves the Proud Boys for nothing. Post-teen to middle-aged men gather in the woods. They dress in camouflage. They are armed with the latest in assault weapons. They carry knives. Are they protecting their right to bear arms, as the NRA would have them believe, or are they assembled to mimic a pubescent rite of passage? The symbolism strikes me as too potent to ignore.
As a boy growing up in the Hollywood Hills of the late 50s and early 60s, I had some guns. My mother allowed them because she had a tenant, Stu, who had been in the Korean War and had a small collection of them. I used to hang out with him and his roommate. Stu would sometimes take me to the desert where he taught me how to shoot and about the care and treatment of guns. Soon I had a few of my own, again with my mother’s okay. My collection was modest. A couple of shotguns (12 and 410 gauge), a bolt loading Remington .22 rifle, and a long-barrel .22 caliber automatic target pistol. I also had a western style holster and thick belt with a .22 caliber replica of a cowboy’s repeating pistol with which I’d practice my fast draw in front of a mirror. Holding a gun was an act of intimacy. The feel of the stock against my cheek was sensual. Looking down the barrel, through the sights I didn’t have to imagine power, I had it. A squeeze on the trigger and the object in the distance would instantaneously feel my presence. Looking back now at my small caliber life I can barely imagine what feelings must course through some young person holding an assault weapon knowing that squeezing the trigger will decimate whatever is in front of the barrel, no aiming necessary.
Every young boy gets his manhood questioned. It could be by the school bully, his friends, or an older guy trying to seduce him. It’s a lot and a lot of men are unable to deal with it. The gun can, and often does, make up for that insecurity. Defending the penis, and by extension (excuse the pun) the pudenda, a young man’s self-worth is upheld. That kid, packing assault heat, marching down the street looking to, what…protect property? Or to show he has the goods, if not between his legs then in his hands. He might just as well have been swinging his dick.
We’re not talking about the right to bear arms so much about the right to enter the world as a gladiator, naked, proud and erect. There is some irony in the recent busting of a truck load of armored and armed guys going to attack an LGBT meeting in Coeur d’alene, Idaho, which suggests how homoeroticism is in play here. People who have given expression to their multitude of sexual identities are certainly not fifth columnists, threatening the political order. The second Amendment says nothing about Gays being un-American. And that wasn’t the first time the Queer community has come under attack by a bunch of gun-toting True Believers.
Besides these groups of “Real Americans” there are the “outdoorsmen”… I’m reminded of all those 4-wheelers tricked out with fat tires and fat fenders, roll bars and winches. Jacked up with fancy suspension. I hardly ever see a dirty 4-wheeler, and in the Hudson Valley, where I live, there are a plenty of them. A lot of these guys have collections of high caliber rifles capable of dropping a hippo or an elephant with a single shot. If they do hunt here, maybe they get some young buck with a few points on their antlers. “I kill, therefore I am,” should be their motto.
America is unique among nations. Our arms industry has created some of the most iconic weapons ever invented. Think of the Colt 45, carried by every soldier in the second World War, or the Winchester rifle, made famous by John Wayne and the former baseball player Chuck Conner in his TV role as The Rifleman. When not being used to kill Indians or bandits, or foreigners, they were used to defend women from the tyranny of other men. It doesn’t get more macho than that.
Now there aren’t many Indians left, the cowboys and the wild west are just artifacts of memory, and the bandits are mostly cyber criminals, so what’s the fallback rationale for our right to bear arms… and ever more powerful guns at that?
We are not under foreign attack. This is not El Salvador or Northern Mexico where gangs dominate the economy…even the Mafia is a shadow of its former self, and the Crips and the Bloods, who even remembers them? Yet the need to have guns, particularly assault weapons is still a felt one. How do we explain this?
What do we learn from the writer, the theorist, the educator who try to fathom the reasoning behind the drive for personal armament in the 21st Century? Rage at the other is rage at the self for its inability to acknowledge and possibly accept the otherness of anima and its place in a healthy psyche. What’s a young man supposed to do with the love he feels for his best friend, particularly when that emotion converges with the evolution of puberty?
The scrim behind which gun-love flourished was made up of so many myths that seem unsustainable now. So we’re stuck watching a last ditch effort to deploy patriotism as the cover for mannish boys’ homoeroticism.
Perhaps all of this will, in the end, become America’s version of Northern Ireland’s Troubles. Should this happen the irony of the Republican solution to the question of gun control, more guns, will be writ in a lot more innocent blood.