Gun Culture Isn’t Gun Policy

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, June 08, 2021

 

Here’s something Charlie Cooke and I disagree about: I don’t much care for AR-style rifles.

 

I know, I know: They’re going to take away my gun-nut card.

 

That’s not to say I haven’t owned them. About five years ago, I bought a nice one, and took it dutifully to the range to keep in practice. But I also own a lawnmower and a box full of tools, and I feel the same way about ARs as I do about other household appliances. The same thing holds for slick, modern, 9mm handguns. They’re useful, but I don’t feel any particular excitement about them.

 

I remember when you used to see guys in Sears ogling tool displays. I never got that, either. Useful? Sure. Beautiful? Not to my eyes.

 

The problem with the gun-grabbers is that they don’t understand why firearms such as the AR are useful, why people buy them, or what they are actually used for. “Nobody needs a gun like that,” they say. “Nobody goes hunting with an AR.”

 

Expect to hear a great deal about this now that a federal court has vacated California’s pre-Heller ban on so-called assault weapons.

 

That claim about hunting is not true, no matter how often it is repeated: AR-pattern rifles are very popular among hunters. The traditional 5.56mm rifles are used by people who hunt small game, predators, and what American hunters and Yosemite Sam call “varmints,” while gun-makers have been for years reconfiguring AR-style rifles for use with proper hunting cartridges. There are good reasons for this, none of which have to do with indiscriminately spraying a herd of elk with lead. AR rifles are popular for target shooting and other purposes, and many hunters prefer to hunt with a familiar firearm. Semiautomatic rifles allow for faster follow-up shots, which is an important consideration both for humane hunting (even skilled and ethical hunters sometimes make a poor shot and need to shoot again to keep a wounded animal from escaping) and for personal safety for those who hunt dangerous animals. American hunters probably shoot more pigs and peccaries every year than any other kind of game animal, ranging from 50-pound javelina to 500-pound feral hogs. (A hog killed in Georgia was reported to weigh in at more than 1,000 pounds, though this is unconfirmed.) Wild hogs are a menace to crops and property, and they also are dangerous, including to the people who hunt them.

 

 “Blasting Bambi with an AR-15!” isn’t part of an argument — it’s a sneer. It should be recognized as such and dismissed as such.

 

It doesn’t end with hunting, of course. Farmers and ranchers use AR-style rifles for pest control, an endless chore for certain kinds of operations. You like free-range chicken? So do coyotes. And people use such rifles for home defense, too. I happen to find them a little awkward for that purpose — I don’t want to drag out a rifle when my wife hears a strange noise in the night — but other people like them just fine for that purpose.

 

Semiautomatic rifles are useful. But many of the people who lead the policy-making conversation don’t really understand that. Many of them don’t care to understand it, some of them understand it but wish that it were not so, and more than a few are too filled with resentment and spite to understand it when it is explained to them. The deep divide in American life between the cities and the countryside is at least as much cultural and aesthetic as it is ideological and political. I know that I can be a broken record on this subject, but it is that visceral revulsion rather than any careful intellectual analysis that explains why the anti-gun lobby in the United States spends almost all of its time focused on what transpires between federally licensed firearms dealers and their clients — among the most law-abiding people you can find — or at gun shows, rather than putting forward policies that are focused on the people who actually commit violent crimes and the generally illegal means by which they obtain firearms.

 

Gun culture, the conservative movement, and the Republican Party have worked to diversify their appeal in recent years, but all of them remain disproportionately white, Southern, rural, Evangelical, and male — and the white, Southern, rural, Evangelical man is the go-to progressive hate-totem.

 

One expression of rightish-libertarianish gun culture is the fashion sometimes mocked by more traditionalist shooters as “tacti-cool,” which involves the fetishization not only of military-style (and style is what this is all about) firearms but other markers of martial fashion, from the coyote-brown “tactical” boots you can see at suburban gun ranges on the feet of men who pretty clearly are not just back from fighting in some foreign desert to the complicated rigs worn by many of the people who choose to open-carry. (As a matter of law, open carry is fine; as a matter of manners, it should be strongly discouraged.) This is what William Gibson was writing about when he observed: “The windows of army surplus stores constitute hymns to male powerlessness.”

 

I get why some people think that kind of thing is ridiculous. I think it’s ridiculous, too. Jacked-up and tricked-out Jeeps with KC lights and jerry-cans, which are put into four-wheel-drive an average of one time per owner, are ridiculous. Motorcycles are ridiculous. College football is ridiculous. White kids with dreadlocks are ridiculous. Paul Krugman is ridiculous. I could make a very long list, but, you know, it’s a free country. People like what they like — and, more to the point, their aspirations are what they are.

 

Style is a funny thing. Tacti-cool isn’t limited to suburban-white-guy mall-ninjas in the 21st century. A big part of the appeal of, say, the Black Panthers in their heyday was that they looked cool in a particularly paramilitary way, with the sharp leather jackets and berets and generalissimo sunglasses, the salutes, the sense of power and discipline they projected. Their politics were defective, but their fashion sense was on-point.

 

And guns follow fashion just like anything else. Guns even have an internal politics: The AR-15 is right-wing, and the AK-47, the iconic weapon of the Communist bloc and Third World revolutionaries, is left-wing. Me, I like my Turkish walnut stocks and French-grey metalwork on rifles and shotguns based on 19th-century models that are even more out-of-date than my politics. But I’m a pointy-headed right-winger who can’t tell if my friends are joking when they call themselves Habsburg legitimists and think that people who jam up the flow at red lights because they’re on their %@$&*! phones ought to be put in stocks alongside people who say epicenter when they mean center and they’re when they mean their.

 

Those are my issues. Your mileage may vary.

 

But we should distinguish between the questions of taste and manners when it comes to firearms and the questions of law and policy. Whatever your preferences regarding the style, conservatives have the better case when it comes to the substance. That’s the truth.

 

And the truth stays the truth — even in California, and even when Gavin Newsom doesn’t like it.