The Liberal Gun Nut

My father and I, at his house in the Catskills, playing the Goldman Sachs-Mini 14 game: We tramp out into the hardwoods, among the butterflies and the mosquitoes, with the rifle, a Ruger Mini-14 .223 banana-clipped at 30 rounds. Fast action semi-automatic, modeled after the M-14 military issue, but short-barreled, carbine-style – a rifle meant to be hidden under raincoats for shooting up the town. Which, being good liberals, we would never do.

Instead, he shouts “GOLDMAN SACHS! ON THE LEFT!” and I leap to it, emptying the magazine, firing from the hip, the muzzle jumping, flaring yellow, the barrel heating, the casings ejected in zinging arcs, the rounds, traveling 3,100 feet per second, splashing dirt and chipping at the wood pile and terrifying the squirrels. “LEHMAN BROS!” shouts my father, which for a moment throws me – the Bros. being defunct – but then instinct kicks in and I let go with another volley. And so on. Good fun, very satisfying. The goal, obviously, is to fire as many rounds as fast as possible – preferably with stopwatch marking time – into the imagined banksters running about in the woods, their mouths gagged with a wad of twenties.

Liberal progressives are supposed to hate guns, the “gun culture” meant as code for the secure ghetto of the bubbas and the rednecks and the “conservatives” and Second Amendment nutjobs. I beg to differ. I know left-wingers, anarchists, socialists, antiwar activists, Democrats, Naderites, anti-corporatists, and antiglobalists who are armed to the teeth, who love their guns, play with their guns, clean them, talk to them, know how to use them, train with them, go hunting with them, kill meat with them, and get together sometimes for shooting parties to knock holes in color photos of corporate criminals.

These are people who read the Nation, Harper’s, the New Yorker, listen to Amy Goodman as gospel, have books like “The Shock Doctrine” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” at their bedside, and even visit lefty propagandists like CounterPunch. Smart, well-read, many of them college-educated, ranging in class from broke and living in a desert tent or trailer park (often by choice) to semi-comfortable and settled in the lower or middling middle classes. Some are off-the-gridders, growing their own food, electrifying their homes with sunlight and wind; some are journalists, artists, businessmen; one of them, an Internet radio entrepreneur, ran for governor of Vermont last year on a ticket whose main platform was “the destruction of the American Empire.”

Consider my father, owner of that bankster-slaughtering Mini-14. Here’s a guy who voted for Obama (regretting it every day), who in a recent letter to the president wrote:

“This nation must not reduce its assistance to our tens of millions of poor citizens; it must not cut Medicaid or Social Security or Medicare. To cover these costs we must increase taxes on all Americans – especially the rich, the Two Percenters who have doubled their wealth over the last generation by draining the wealth of the great mass of low, moderate and middle income folks. The behavior of the government toward the rich – allowing the Two Percenters to fleece everyone else – is not only morally obscene; it is bad for business.”

A proud liberal, a believer in the possibilities of good government, my father also owns shotguns, hunting rifles, .22 plinkers.

Or consider my friend Travis Kelly, a writer and political cartoonist in Grand Junction, Colo. – self-described “member of America’s most closeted and underestimated minority, liberals who own guns” – who wrote a piece for Hustler magazine recently along the same lines as this article. Among the reasons for his being pro-gun (he owns a lot of them): A friend of his, along a lonely stretch of Texas highway a few years ago, was kidnapped and nearly raped. Luckily she had a pistol in her pocket, a little .38 revolver, and with it plugged her attacker in the stomach as he was unbuckling his pants.

More here




TX: Good Samaritan attacked; shoots: "A 62-year-old man who stopped to help a couple on the side of the road Thursday evening in Southeast Bexar County ended up shooting the man he was trying to help after he was allegedly attacked, Bexar County deputies said. A 31-year-old man and his wife had been traveling on FM 78 around 7 p.m. when their truck ran out of gas at Firestone Parkway, and the older man pulled over to help, deputies said. A dispute arose between the two men over how the husband was addressing his wife. nvestigators believe the older man was assaulted before he fired his gun, likely in self defense, said Sgt. Blake Johnson with the Bexar County Sheriff's Office. The husband, who was shot in the shoulder with a revolver, was taken to Brooke Army Medical Center in noncritical condition."


IN: Man acquitted in shooting death: "A Lake Superior Court jury on Friday acquitted a Gary man of voluntary manslaughter in a 2007 homicide after about 2 hours of deliberations. The jury acquitted Richard Glenn Edmonds Jr., 37, in the shooting death of Samuel Elder, 38, who died shortly after 7 p.m. Dec. 9, 2007, on the second-floor landing at 1750 Mississippi St. Defense attorney James Thiros said Edmonds never denied shooting Elder, but asserted he was acting in self-defense after Elder ran up to him, claimed to be a police officer and then struggled with Edmonds after producing a handgun. Edmonds pushed the gun away from his face and drew his own gun, for which he had a valid license to carry. Elder was shot in the neck."


TN: Aggressive crook shot: "The man found shot to death in a West Knox County home Thursday morning had just been released from jail in Rutherford County, according to the Knox County Sheriff's Office and state correction records. Deputies found the body after being summoned at 7:14 a.m. Thursday about a domestic disturbance at 9325 Wells Station Road in the Nicholas Landing subdivision. James Szczuka, 49, and his girlfriend Dena Harris, 24, lived at the home. Szczuka said he acted in self-defense when he fatally shot Eledge. He said he'd discovered the man asleep in bed with Harris. No charges have been filed in the killing. Szczuka told authorities the man became aggressive and threatening when he woke him up. The man allegedly refused to leave. Szczuka grabbed a .40-caliber handgun, which he has a permit for, and shot the man when he allegedly "came at him," according to Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Martha Dooley."