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SecularMotion

(7,981 posts)
Thu Mar 13, 2014, 06:19 AM Mar 2014

Why Are So Many Conservative Politicians Brandishing Guns?

Yes, we know it's all a show, that it's all about appealing to (appeasing) the NRA crowd, and demonstrating that a buttoned-down insider like Mitch McConnell is really one of the guys. Fine. But I have to say, there's something about it that just feels sinister.

OK, so John Kerry pandered too in 2004, with his whole hunter shtick, but McConnell did something very different at CPAC this past week. He brought a gun to an explicitly political gathering (he then handed it to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), as part of presenting Coburn with an NRA lifetime achievement award). Now, it's not like taking out your Colt .45 and laying it upon your desk on the Senate floor, but it's one more example of the mixing of politics and implicit violence that conservatives are deploying more and more often.

Among countless other examples, last month we saw Todd Staples, a candidate for lieutenant governor in Texas, run the following TV ad:

"You're not a king, and Texans bow to no one," Mr. Staples says, looking directly into the camera and addressing the president, before he is shown picking up a gun at a store, aiming it over a counter and vowing to "fight Obama's liberal agenda.&quot snip) [Staples] ends on an equally aggressive note: "So, Mr. President, if you still want to mess with Texas, we've got a saying for you: Come and take it."

In response, Kathleen Hall Jamison, the head of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, asked: "Why would [sic] need a gun to fight an agenda? You don't shoot a policy or shoot an agenda--you fight an agenda with words." Great question.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-reifowitz/why-are-so-many-conservat_b_4929978.html
12 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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irisblue

(32,829 posts)
1. conservative aging/old white men are compensating
Thu Mar 13, 2014, 06:43 AM
Mar 2014

for lack of brains, heart, intelligence, ability and politics and so on. They remind me of the ape in 2001, A Space Odyssey, waving a femur bone and they look twice as foolish.

 

pipoman

(16,038 posts)
3. In fairness, the gun McConnell gave Coburn
Thu Mar 13, 2014, 07:38 AM
Mar 2014

Was a presentation musket, not exactly an assault weapon...

Paladin

(28,202 posts)
6. You're the one introducing the term "assault weapon" here, not the OP.
Thu Mar 13, 2014, 10:23 AM
Mar 2014

And most of us don't give a fuck about affording McConnell any "fairness."
 

pipoman

(16,038 posts)
12. Obviously it isn't about fairness
Thu Mar 13, 2014, 06:45 PM
Mar 2014

it is about not looking like an imbecile, destroying the point one is trying to convey, by fallacious anecdote.

canoeist52

(2,282 posts)
4. Because guns are all they have left.
Thu Mar 13, 2014, 09:28 AM
Mar 2014

They lose on every nuanced issue with most voters, and guns are a simple symbol to play to their shrinking base.

 

hollowdweller

(4,229 posts)
11. You hit the nail on the head
Thu Mar 13, 2014, 02:17 PM
Mar 2014

The GOP wins on fear.

Convincing gun owners despite 30 years of loosening of the laws that they are under attack and unless the vote republican they won't have their guns.

With their inequality agenda the dems are reaching out to a lot of these voters because most are poor or middle class and only vote GOP due to their guns. So the GOP needs to double down.

Aristus

(66,093 posts)
5. Because they'd need tweezers to grasp their penises, and you can't display your penis in public
Thu Mar 13, 2014, 10:14 AM
Mar 2014

anyway.

They need some kind of phallic symbol to flaunt to the other micro-penises out there.

I tell you, the pathetic Rambo fantasies these limp-dick, soft, fat, white, ineffectual shitheads dream...

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