“Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.”- Hunter S. Thompson
Recently, as I was out trying to buy ammunition for my revolver, I found to my great surprise, and indeed, horror, that the shelves were bare, a few scattered boxes of .22 rimfire rounds the only evidence that I was in the right place. No bullets, I thought? Was I dreaming? Had I woken up in the wrong country again? Surely I wasn’t on my native soil, because this was supposed to be America, god damn it! This was the land where we liked our ammunition like our women: cheap, plentiful, and expendable.
What was going on? Were we under attack? Had I been deaf to an air raid siren warning against some hell-bent enemy horde? Was the apocalypse actually nigh?
Jesus, what if I had missed a sale?
It was actually none of those things, I soon realized. It seemed that some concerned citizens had been out shopping. Quite a bit. For a hell of a lot of guns. So much so that the gun section of the store I was in looked like the toy aisle in Wal-mart the day after Christmas.
Now, I knew that some of our more conservative brethren had been, shall we say, a touched concerned about the Obama victory, but the empty shelves of ammunition pointed to much more ominous workings. They weren’t simply sitting around the kitchen table, sighing heavily and complaining about the sad fate of the country; they were muttering darkly in smoky taverns about the New World Order and dusting off their copies of the Turner Diaries and stocking up on 30 round magazines. Ye Gods, these bastards were serious.
According to the FBI, there were 1.5 million more background checks for firearms last year than in 2007, with the last three months of the year seeing a sharp increase over the same period the previous year. While the FBI and ATF refuse to publicly speculate on the cause for this, all you need to do is check the Outdoor Wire, an e-newsletter catering to the outdoor industry, which declared Obama to be their “2008 Gun Salesman of the Year,” probably to guffawing and thigh slapping and drink clinking at their annual Christmas Party.
I’m not about to get sidelined into an argument on the finer points for or against gun ownership here, because: a. I can’t change your mind either way on the subject, and b. I don’t care what you think about it, because this isn’t about the second amendment anyways. The issue at stake is that guns are usually only as dangerous as the people who carry them, and right now there are a lot of unstable people with a lot of guns who, unhinged by fear and paranoia driven deep into their hearts by the new administration, have backed themselves into a corner from which there is little escape except in a hail of bullets.
Of course, that seemed like a pretty heavy thing to base on a single visit to a single gun store. I needed more information; I needed to consult with some colleagues; I needed a place which would provide me concentration, clarity, and calm; I needed a firing range.
You can learn a lot of interesting things hanging around a gun range. Whether it’s the easiest way to convert an AR-15 to fully automatic, or how it’s legal in Louisiana to shoot someone stealing your car, you’re bound to walk away a little more informed. So when I was waiting for a lane and overheard the owner of the range tell a customer about some impending tax increase on ammunition, I listened more closely. He was complaining bitterly about something like a 500 percent increase in taxes that “they” were on the verge of enacting. ”My distributors are already having to increase prices,” he said as he was ringing up a few boxes of 9mm rounds, “but in a couple of months, it’s going to be horrible. Prices are gonna be outrageous, man, outrageous. First the bullets, then the guns.”
This was news to me. I certainly had heard plenty about gun bans, but what was this about a massive tax on bullets? Had someone in Washington been listening to Chris Rock?
The issue came up again in the days following. Sitting around barrooms, several people told me how “that bastard in Washington” was going to make ammunition unattainable as the first step in his disarming of America. Here were more people corroborating the range owner’s story. There might be something to this, I thought.
As a deeply skeptical individual, however, I tend not to take at face value what men drinking whiskey slurringly tell me about, well, anything, so I decided to pry into the matter using the critical thinking and crack investigational skills I have assiduously honed over the years: I used Google.
Which failed to turn up anything whatsoever, except for an interview with Obama from 1999 where he agreed with the principle of raising taxes on ammunition. So much for that.
So while my search for the bottom of this ammunition shortage led to the dead end of a rumor, it was exactly what I was looking for. The run on ammunition was based on speculation and fear, driven by the same forces that had guns flying off the shelves. So why had the empty shelves caught me off guard?
Because it really comes as no surprise to me that people are stocking up on guns. After all, the last time a Democrat was in the White House, both the Brady Bill and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban were enacted, to the extreme chagrin of the NRA and arms manufactures, who drummed up public outrage (well, at least a few rather loud, outraged voices) that told of the coming National Weapons Sweep which would make the entire populace impotent against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. The country would be overrun by tyrants and terrorists, as the US Government watched helplessly (or complicitly) as the country crumbled into bloodshed and anarchy and the twilight of its glory.
I had been working under the impression that, seeing how none of the predictions the NRA was feverishly spewing in the 90′s failed to materialize, maybe people had somehow understood the basic fault of their logic, and that we had gotten past that sort of thing a good decade ago.
It’s times like that when my prevailing cynical realism starts to mock my little optimistic core mercilessly while kicking it right in the balls. ”People don’t learn things, you idiot”, it says, “They just continually find new things to reinforce their own delusional little views.”
So with that in mind, I was reading the NRA archives and found an “Urgent Alert” from December 2008 that left me with little wonder why conservatives were literally up in arms:
If Hillary Clinton is confirmed as Secretary of State, she’ll rip the Second Amendment right out of the Bill of Rights. She’ll be our nation’s top diplomat with the power to determine whether the United Nations will pass, and Obama will sign, a global gun ban treaty that will surrender our Second Amendment rights and our national sovereignty.
Man, does the NRA give Hillary way too much credit. Not only will she be the invisible hand bending the United Nations to her will, but she’ll control Obama’s signing hand too? And there is the issue of a global gun ban. No one listens to UN; the US hasn’t done it in years. And even if the US did sign on to something that absurd, how exactly do they propose to enforce it? The security force assigned to that task would be so vastly outgunned that the UN Security Council would be better off just shooting the soldiers in the head before they deployed and save on all the travel expenses.
But then fear and reason never were very good at communicating, and fear works a hell of a lot better for membership drives.
Most of the people stocking up on guns wouldn’t admit that they’re scared, and in fact probably aren’t even aware that they are operating under its guile. They would chalk up their shopping spree to preparation or self-survival and speak angrily about the “erosion of rights” and fascism, but beneath all that talk is crippling undercurrent of fear. After living for the past 21 out of 29 years in a political climate that was on their side, it must be a great shock to wake up and realize that the other side has control, because if control is all of what you’ve known, powerlessness will fill you with confusion and dread and reflexively force you into a defensive crouch.
Which in itself can be harmless enough. Being on the defensive can be an enlightening and educational experience, as you are forced to confront your own inadequacies and learn to adapt and improve. The problem with the Right is that they are a group on the defensive, which is a much more dangerous thing, because groups have a tendency to come to conclusions and decisions that are more extreme than what the individual members of the group might consider. It is the process which drives a lynch mob or a pep rally, and goes by the technical name of group polarization. While the processes which generate it are hardly agreed upon, I find that there are two fairly simple rules which propagate this phenomenon. Namely, that people usually don’t like to be wrong in front of other people, and when they are in doubt, they will agree with their friends. If you are in a room with a lot of people passionate about something, there is a good chance that you will find yourself swayed, even if it’s a tiny amount, towards the consensus view. It is the cumulative effects of those little amounts which matter, as they add up and feed into each other.
As the minority in Washington and, perhaps, in the entire country, the Right has to come together to try to summon resources and maintain what power they hold. But as they sense the political climate growing more hostile towards them, they become more insular in the name of solidarity. This insularity will only serve to exacerbate the problem of polarization, as they will increasingly reject outside opinion and rely on internal information, which can create a self-perpetuating spiral into some grim depths.
This climate of fear and paranoia therefore creates a cycle whereby the wholesale arming of Republicans only serves to drive them deeper into madness and militias. The fear of a global gun ban, due to a new, seemingly hostile administration, drives them to buy guns, which of course necessitate ammunition. Then a rumor about an impending 500 percent ammunition tax, confidently (and conveniently) relayed by their trusted salesman, leads to a huge surge in demand. Now someone who might be a little skeptical about the whole thing but is considering buying a gun “just in case” goes to the store to just look around. He is greeted by the sight of bare shelves and a sparse selection of weapons. What else is he to think than that maybe his friends were right, because he can see with his own eyes that guns and bullets are in heavy demand, so maybe he should probably get what he can before it’s too late.
Which is exactly what an friend of mine did. He has spent over $7,000 on guns, ammo, safes, extra clips, concealed carry holsters, laser sights, and Christ knows what else, all because he “didn’t know what was going to happen.” He complained bitterly about what a terrible strain it was on his budget, but that it was “necessary.” This was someone who had no firearms before the election, but had been driven by irrational fear of some impending doom to stock himself better than some SWAT teams. The NRA magazines around the house surely weren’t any help.
The best part of this entire affair is that, towards the end of last year, alcohol sales were showing no signs of faltering. In fact, I remember seeing the figure 25 percent thrown around, which mirrors the firearms sales number a little too closely for my comfort. That correlation illuminates in my mind a portrait of this country populated by a lot of irate, emotionally wounded, gun toting paranoids, all of them slamming whiskey and mumbling to themselves as they clean their expansive arsenal and inventory their ammunition.
Which is nothing new, of course; it’s just that, with Obama in the White House, they have a very visible and polarizing target to point all of their frustrations to.
Being angry, alone, armed, and guzzling whiskey while brooding over the inevitable is something I am well acquainted with; I find you need something to balance out a good cry with. For a citizenry it is a dangerous thing, however, because you become lost in constructs and scenarios of your own reckoning, which booze only makes seem that much more plausible, and requiring much more immediate action.
I am comforted by the fact that they are loud and angry now; when things start to get unusually silent is when we should start to feel concerned. So let them yell and curse about the enemies of freedom and threaten secession: after riding so high for so long, a tantrum is in order and should come as a surprise to no one.
Of course, my personal fear is that some terrible blow will befall the country, something that will serve to legitimize the cause and craziness of the Far Right, who will crush the fledgling administration before it has the time to affect any real change, and who will drag us down into some libertarian nightmare of a country. After all, that’s how they grew so powerful the last time around.
And now that I’m thinking about it, I just got this urge to go shopping…
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Apparently I’m not the only one paying attention to these things. Check out- http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/04/ammo.shortage/index.html