The response to my last-but-one post about gun nuts was remarkable. Within hours of it appearing, alert and alarmed gunlovers in the USA had been notified thanks to their trusty Google Alerts that presumably notify them whenever a bit of Wrong Thinking appears on one of the millions of blogs around the world. Somebody sounded whatever alarm they have and the pack came in yapping to attack the unrighteous heretic.

They’re still at it even as I write, a whole bunch of them milling around in moderation, like triffids pissed off when they found the fence had been electrified overnight. But I have some standards and there’s only so much manifest bullshit I’m prepared to allow on a thread before I pull the pin. Indulging them with 45 comments seemed more than generous. Let them go back to their own blogs where they can high five each other for their own rhetorical brilliance in winning the arguments they were having with themselves.

The funny thing was that these roosters illustrated what I wrote in my post so perfectly it was eerie, if a tad unsettling. They truly hate their own country; get rid of the cities, says one, cos there’s nothing there worth saving (including the inhabitants, one assumes he means) while another’s wife isn’t game to go to the movies unless hubby is packing a concealed handgun in case the cinema turns into Bad Day at Baghdad. Several openly state their guns are the only things that protect them from their fellow-Americans who would just love to harm them if they had the chance.

Even though my post said nothing whatever about the links between gun control and crime, most of the commenters pulled out their well-thumbed NRA talking points and proceeded to explain why everyone having guns was a great thing for keeping crime under control and if you took away people’s guns, crime would go through the roof. One lunatic even cited figures showing how this had been demonstrated in Australia (naturally when pressed to provide a link to his evidence he fell back on the well-worn blogger’s rejoinder that I should learn to use Google, despite my having posted a link to Australian Institute of Criminology statistics showing what a crock of shit his argument was). Others used the shop-worn tactic of cherry picking a change from 1996-98 and calling it a trend, ignoring the existence of contrary changes over a longer period.

In fact, they nearly all scrupulously declined to respond to facts that contradicted their opinions, such as the fact that virtually all developed countries have strict gun ownership laws like Australia’s and the exception, the USA, demonstrably has vastly higher rates of gun-related crime. Those who did respond did so with various versions of the line “Yeah well we’re Americans buddy, we’re not like anybody else and we’ll own guns because we have the right”, which rather lacked relevance I thought.

Apart from their need to protect themselves from their neighbours, many commenters hailed their possession of guns as evidence of their manly preparedness to stand up to government oppression. Quite how this would work in the USA where the government spends more money on the military than the rest of the world put together, they didn’t bother to explain. Maybe their shotguns and semi-automatic rifles would have more luck against cruise missiles than Saddam’s tanks and artillery but somehow I doubt it. When challenged to nominate examples in history where armed citizens had successfully resisted government oppression, many obediently named the War of Independence, as if the circumstances of the 1770s could meaningfully be compared to those of the 21st century. No mention of the innumerable other, more recent revolutions in which success was achieved by the people despite them not being armed to the teeth with legal weapons.

Nor did anybody see fit to mention the American Civil War, which one would hardly call a shining example of the virtues of universal gun ownership. Bizarrely, however, the 1944 Warsaw uprising got a mention by not one but two people, so presumably it’s on one of the standard NRA talking point sheets. Just how anyone can regard an incident in which virtually all those involved were slaughtered as an argument for gun ownership escapes me. I invited them to discuss whether post-invasion Iraq was a good example of the benefits bestowed on a society by the widespread private ownership of deadly weapons but none seemed disposed to tackle the question.

The most astonishing thing about the whole exercise was its pointlessness. Most of the comments had nothing to do with the content of my post. They were a Pavlovian, generic response to a perceived criticism of gun ownership. Even when I pointed out that nobody was arguing that increased gun controls reduced crime, they kept flooding the thread with meaningless statistics and illogical conclusions.

Another 20 or so comments are in moderation now and that’s where they’ll stay. This isn’t a site for use by paranoid Americans to tell us how big their dicks are and how much they hate and fear their fellow man. Coincidentally, I read something this morning in a Glenn Greenwald blog about Barack Obama that seems highly relevant:

From a 1989 front-page article in The New York Times written by R.W. Apple, on the very day when the first President Bush ordered the ludicrous (though deadly) Panamanian invasion (”Operation Just Cause”):

For George Bush, the United States invasion of Panama early this morning constituted a Presidential initiation rite as well as an attempt to achieve specific goals. . . . For better or for worse, most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest. . . . - all of them acted in the belief that the American political culture required them to show the world promptly that they carried big sticks.

Barack Obama doesn’t appear to be all that eager to start a lot of wars and send people off to die. Therefore, unlike George Bush and Dick Cheney — whose hard-core manliness has never been in doubt despite lives completely devoid of any acts reflecting traditional masculine virtues — it seems that Obama (just like Kerry and Gore before him) probably isn’t man enough. He’s basically just a girl — weak and scared and afraid of fighting — and therefore not really fit to be Commander-in-Chief. So sayeth the people, like Glenn Reynolds and his war-cheerleading comrades, followed by like-minded media allies, who — quite revealingly — are the absolute last ones fit to arbitrate such matters.

I’m sure the flying monkeys would heartily disagree with Greenwald and Apple and endorse the warmongering opinions of Reynolds. Therein lies the danger which the USA poses to other nations … not only do many yanks hate and fear their fellow-Americans, they hate and fear the rest of the world.

(HT to Gummo Trotsky for the cool picture which I stole from one of his Larvatus Prodeo threads a long time ago.)

UPDATE:

And still they come. Long after any sane person would have retreated to his shed to polish his Smith & Wesson, the gunlovers surge around the comments box hitting the ‘Submit’ button, oblivious to the rather obvious fact that their carefully-compiled wisdom (no doubt written with tongue poking cutely out of the corner of the mouth while they consulted a dictionary) will simply disappear into cyberspace, never to appear online again. Maybe it’s a form of therapy.

Groupthink reigns supreme. Three scholars have now informed me that the Warsaw uprising occurred in 1943, no doubt because that’s what it (erroneously) says on their NRA ‘fact’ sheet. A more astonishing historical fact of which I was previously unaware is that the Japanese planned to invade the USA in WW2 but decided not to once they realised how impossible it would be to subdue the feisty shotgun-carrying population. If only the Chinese government had issued .303s to every adult male in 1933, history might have been very different my friends.

Of course half the comments are the usual juvenile crap that infests the blogosphere everywhere. You know the kind of thing: commenter raises several wholly irrelevant issues, demands that they be answered, and when they are ignored, commenter whoops and hollers about how they have ‘won’ the ‘debate’, which of course only ever existed in their own infantile minds. Such nonsense can be found on most blogs about topics from global warming to breeding tropical fish.

Much more serious is the drum beat that runs through virtually all the comments: they are Americans, they are way superior to other people, they don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks about anything and they’ll do whatever they fucking well want because they’re the men.

Truly scary people, just like the imbecile in the White House and the Republican maniac who wants to take his place.