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dcnovice -> Liberal Gun Advocates (12/20/2012 6:54:47 PM)
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One of the self-care pillars of my online life is not discussing guns, and this thread will probably give a renewed sense of the wisdom of that policy. But I can't resist raising a question that's simmered on my back burner for years and is bubbling a bit louder due to recent events and threads.
Every so often, I've noticed, posters who generally skew left take up for guns and seemingly unlimited ownership of them with a striking degree of gusto. They seem particularly eager to (I can't resist) outgun the NRA itself in pouring ridicule on the very mention of gun control.
Now I'm not disputing anyone's First Amendment rights (nor Second, I'd better add hastily), but the psychology of the situation intrigues me. Might it, I wonder, be a reaction to conservatives' skill over the past few decades at painting liberals as softer, gentler, more prone to salmon than red meat? Remember Spiro Agnew's "effete, East Coast, pseudo-intellectual snobs"? (The phrasing was actually Willaim Safire's, I think, but I digress effetely.)
Underlying all that, of course, is the notion that liberals are, well, unmanly--just plain sissies even.
Against that backdrop, is clamoring like an Idaho hunter for the right to own and use something that's long, hard, round, and shoots a way of saying, "Bring on the beer and the beef! I'm just as much a man as you are!"?
Anyone else ever wonder about this?
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