re: #306 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I am more concerned about other people who are ready to start shooting.

I’ve been thinking for quite a while that the fascist element’s fetish for guns, personally-owned small arms, may be an exploitable weakness. This is the real reason I taunt them about not having all the guns. The terrorist “militia” movement is a subset of the American gun culture. In many ways it is an extreme rationale for owning guns, rather than the claimed opposite, that they have guns because they oppose the “tyranny” of liberal society. There are, of course, many ideologically committed racists and fascists in the movement, but they are essentially piggy-backing on the gun culture.

As such it has an analog in the world of military politics, the constant (and often very harmful) rivalry among the “platform lobbies.” This refers to a commitment to a particular methodology, represented by the platform that embodies it, among those who are professionally involved in that methodology. Professional aviators propose that aviation is the key to winning future conflicts and they are opposed by the advocates of artillery, submariners propose the same for submarines and skirmish constantly with the advocates of surface ships. This is about money in both cases, the competition for budget allocations in the military and commercial competition for discretionary consumer spending in the gun culture.

The gun goobers have ONE platform, privately owned small arms. In the past, right-wingers have also favored bombs but that has faded under the pressure of regulation, and the rise of the NRA and the gun industry to political prominence. The makers of explosives are vehemently opposed to the use of their products by terrorists and political bullies. The makers of guns, aided and abetted by the NRA and its political tools, are not.

For extremists, the gun culture is essentially a religion. Guns, like God, cannot fail, they can only be failed. If guns do fail, the cultists will not change their methods. They will double down and rationalize until they vanish.