We’re losing the culture war. Our children are growing up in a culture that hides all traces of firearms and simultaneously makes them into something evil, something that should be avoided at all costs. The unrelenting message that “guns are bad”, coupled with a total lack of positive images, will significantly impact the gun control movement in a generation – as more and more people grow up completely ignorant of firearms, less and less people will be around to fight for gun owners’ rights.Unfortunately, I believe he's correct. This was, is and has always been a battle for "hearts and minds" — I like Toy's analogy that the other side is playing chess, and we're playing checkers. Think about that when you finally get to view the industry's "huge" dreadfully expensive initiative to lure those kids into hunting birds on preserves!
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Year End Carnival of Cordite Up
Check it out here. Especially pay attention to Toys in the Attic 's thoughts on how we pay be winning in the political arena, but we're still losing the cultural war:
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4 comments:
I have read your warning that you "fling poo."
I understand that.
But I feel the need to fling a bit of poo myself in this case.
I understand and agree with your assessment that the gun industry's push to get kids into hunting is wrong-headed and out-of-date.
But I have to address the "losing the culture war" stuff.
I have heard, for years and years, that gun owners are "losing the culture war."
When I was about 9 years old I read an editorial in Field and Stream (I think it was) that was a fictional story in which Grandpa had a little ceremony wherein he had a "funeral" for his shotguns.
He buried them out in the field, because the laws banning all guns had finally been passed, and he'd never go bird hunting with his grandson any more.
So he buried his guns instead of turning them in to the government.
That piece was published some time in the mid-1970s.
I'm still waiting for grandpa to have his little funeral in the field for his shotguns....only grandpa's own funeral was about 20 years ago, and I'm all grown up now myself.
And I've got a lot more guns than I did when I was only nine.
Since about the mid-1970s, I've also been hearing, over and over, that it's just a matter of time until they take all our guns.
I've heard, for all that time, that the anti-gun laws would first be passed in California, and eventually, irresitably, all the laws from California would eventually sweep over the entire country and we'd all lose our guns.
Well, it's been about 30 years, and you know what? I'm still waiting on the gun-ban tide from California to sweep over my own state of Arkansas. (To be completely honest, I've always believed that all that "whatever-happens-in-California-will-eventually-happen-everywhere" line was always spouted by self-absorbed Californians who greatly over-estimate the influence their own state has, but I digress......)
This "losing the culture war" stuff seems to fly in the face of reality.
Wisconsin just passed its own CCW law this week.....Wisconsin..... after Minnesota passed its CCW law......which happened years and years after all but about three or four of the 50 states passed their CCW laws.
Yeah...we're really losing the culture war when you consider the dismal failure of getting CCW in all but about three states, aren't we?
And oh yeah.....shooting sports are now high school varsity sports that you can earn a letter in in states like Georgia and Tennessee....and this all happened in about the last 10 years....really getting hammered in the culture wars there.
And the AWB is now dead after a stupid 10-year experiment....another huge loss in the culture wars.
And more women than at any point in the history of this country are buying guns......another example of how we're getting absolutely killed in the culture wars.....
And NCAA rifle actually got its first bit of network news coverage this past year, and more and more schools are adding rifle as a varsity sport....yep, another hammering in the culture wars for our side.
And ignore any and all victories we might get in the political arena......politics are strictly separate from culture, you know.......we're losing big time in culture, no matter what might happen politically.....
I'm sorry, but when I hear folks whine that we're losing the culture war on guns, all I can muster is a big fat yawn.......
I suppose that's because I've been hearing that we're losing the "culture wars" since the mid-1970s. But not only does it appear we aren't losing, it looks more and more to me like we're winning.
C'mon, there's a link out there right now on how Oberlin College, the most liberal of the loony-left campuses in the country now has a 27-member rifle club.......another loss for us in the culture wars?
But I suppose it's a bigger kick and just plain more fun to be a prophent of gloom and doom, isn't it?
Maybe instead of predicting gloom and doom in the "culture wars" the Carnival of Cordite guy might spend a bit more time taking folks the range and teaching them how to shoot?
But that all might be a bit more work than blogging a prediction of defeat in the culture wars, a defeat that's been predicted and predicted and re-predicted since I was old enough to read and understand a little story about grandpa burying his guns that was published right at 30 years ago.
If you ignore all the progress we've made on CCW and women owning guns, and shooting sports being introduced to high school and college students and laws benefitting us getting passed, yeah, we're losing, and it's a just a matter of time, because we're doomed, and it's all over, and it won't last but another generation or so because we're losing the culture wars......
Yawn...........
"We’re losing the culture war."
HA! It is to laugh. Kids think that the folks who tell them right from wrong are idiots, so they try whatever's "bad" as soon as they can. In the case of guns, they find out, rather quickly, that teacher was LYING. In much the same way that graduates of D.A.R.E. have a much higher rate of drug abuse, so, too, I expect a wave of gun owners to sprout from our gun-hatin' schools.
Hm.. I read stories of kids in the 50's and 60's walking to school with their rifles so they could shoot in the basement after school. I don't see anything like that level of it's-an-ordinary-object familarity today. Maybe it's good that guns are becoming specialty items like jet-skis-- loud, fun and not terribly useful for the most part. But then again our local lakes have started banning jet-skis during busy times too..
From: http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2005/12/potato-guns.html
"Remember when kids could play with toy guns and they were not a symbol of all that was evil in the world? My daughter doesn't. She warned me that she could never bring the potato gun to school without the risk of expulsion. The sheer joy of running around being a kid is denied to our children today"
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