re: #136 wrenchwench

Culture can change. Americans used to love tobacco and think marijuana would make you psychotic. Some still do, but they mostly don’t make the rules anymore.

Culture can change, true. But opinions about tobacco and marijuana were never really religious in nature, not the same way gun worship is.

American gun worship is part of the ingrained social structure of the country. It’s as much a part of the nation as sports, as evangelical Christianity, as racism. All of these things, individually, aren’t really followed by a huge majority of the population any more. Most individual Americans aren’t racist, or evangelical Christians, and don’t follow a sport fervently. The power of the NRA is relatively small. But the power of these things isn’t just in the numbers of people that believe. It is also in the role they play in the fabric of the nation. Some of those roles are positive - sports are a bonding experience, and religion can be too. But some roles aren’t, and the role that guns play isn’t hunting, or sport shooting, or even self-defence. Guns, in American culture, represent the power of white men over the lives of the rest of us. That’s why the NRA never defends black men who get shot, or women who kill a man abusing them. That’s why an armed black man is a gang member, who must be put down by the state, while an armed white man is a hero, and if an armed white man kills a bunch of innocent people, then the nation quickly frames the idea that while that guy might not have been, armed white men in general are still heroes. The quiet part of the Second Amendment is that guns are for white men, and they are there so we don’t forget that white men can kill us if they want to.

That culture can change too. But it’s going to take a lot more than education campaigns, or shocking pictures. It’s going to take a change in how the culture approaches white male supremacy in general.