Why Are Republicans Crazy About Guns?

My godfather is one of the largest gun distributors in the south. Every time there’s a mass shooting in America two things are guaranteed to happen: the NRA will start claiming in all their media outlets that “The Government will take away all your guns!!!”, and the the paranoid legions who believe the NRA will raid the local gun shops. As a result, my godfather literally makes millions dollars the weekend after a mass shooting. It’s the cyclical business model of the gun industry: mass shooting -> NRA says government will take away guns -> guns fly off the shelves.

The marketing department of the gun industry (a.k.a. the NRA) has done its job to convince gun lovers, and therefore congressmen from red districts, that any gun law making it a little more difficult to amass guns is somehow end of all gun rights in America – and end of America as they know it because for some bizarre reason they’re all convinced that Freedom is defined by unlimited gun ownership. It is a very, very strange world in which these people live and entirely outside the rest of the world. Thank you NRA.

But why do republicans seem to love guns so much?

Where was that desire born? Is the desire to stockpile weapons natural, learned, or injected by NRA’s paranoia-driven marketing plan?

First, we must be fair: not all republicans have a love affair with guns, just like not all democrats hate them. However, nearly all rabid gun lovers fall into the republican camp because the NRA has been successful at making it a wedge issue.

The NRA has positioned the Republican Party in such a way that if someone is a single-issue voter on guns, then they must be a registered republican. The NRA is one of the most successful marketing firms in human history, fully convincing pockets of America that “democrats will storm into your house and take away all your guns!”  It’s not a truth without exceptions. Many democrats like guns, too, but rabid gun lovers – the “from-my-cold-dead-hands” gun lovers – are always republicans because of how the NRA has shaped the GOP platform since the 1970’s, and how the NRA has manipulated member perception that the Democratic Party desires to “take away your guns”, which simply is not true.

We grant the fact that not all republicans are wacky about guns, but we still need to look into why, exactly, guns symbolize freedom inside the gun culture. That’s the odd part in the wacky world of republican gunland: when and how did they come to believe that in order to be free, you must own an arsenal of weapons?

The NRA annexed the anti-government movement and made it about gun rights

There have always been small pockets of the U.S. population who are anti-government. Usually they just moved to Alaska or had cabins in the woods; they didn’t like taxes and had issues about privacy. We could co-exists without any problems.

But the NRA and the gun lobby changed that.

The NRA saw an opportunity to annex the anti-government groups in the same way the Republican Party annexed the Tea Party movement. They took the message and mutated it into the larger, extremely conservative dialog. What was once on the far, far, outskirts of political belief (that the government will take away all your guns and all your freedoms) has now become a common belief within the extreme far right wing in this country. It was done intentionally, deliberately, and with a profit motive by the NRA.

The more paranoid people are, the more guns they will buy. That’s the NRA business, operations, and marketing model all wrapped into a single philosophy.

Whereas the anti-government groups had a plethora of different reasons to distrust government, the gun rights issue wasn’t the center reason. Owning guns was part of their defense, but it wasn’t the main reason why they hated the government. That’s the part that the NRA has been successful changing. Now, it’s all about guns.

The right to own as many guns and whatever type of guns as one wants is the primary, secondary, and tertiary reason to hate the U.S. government, and the National Rifle Association is very, very good and injecting that paranoid into the already paranoid.

Not all republicans are crazy about guns, but they are crazy about protecting themselves. Conservatives hate change, and therefore a in a constant battle to protect their status quo against the world that is in constant change. The NRA has convinced the hard-right hook, line, and sinker that owning the biggest, baddest guns possible is the only way to protect one’s family and property. All data proves otherwise, but as we know, facts don’t matter in the GOP; only keeping the GOP base in a constant state of fear matters.

The more the paranoid, über-conservative right are convinced the government will take away the one and only thing with which they can protect themselves (the big, bad gun), the more the tension builds, and the more people lash out in fear (and buy even more guns). The more people lash out in fear, the more gun violence we see… and therefore… in response to all the increased gun violence… they get even more paranoid feeding into the cycle.

When people start showing off their guns like they do their kids, then we have a problem.

There’s an increasing number of photos on the Internet of people laying out their guns on a towel or on their beds then taking photos of them. Proud of their weapons. The photos scream a sort of defiance coupled with anger – bad combination when the thing in their hands can kill with a simple pull of the trigger.

That’s the other aspect of the NRA’s marketing campaigns that has made ultra-republicans love their guns so much: create pride in the defiance against anything and anyone who might dare even mention gun safety or gun control. The NRA has created that solidarity among crazy gun lovers, which does one thing: increase the intensity with which they “defend” themselves. That’s not cool given that the NRA has been creating ghosts to scare these people for so long.

Keep an eye on the gun photos on the Internet. The more you see people taking photos and posting them as if they’re photos of their own children, the bigger this problem will be. Some crazy gun lovers actually do value their guns as much as their children, so the thought of losing them, not matter how fabricated that fear, causes them to lash out.

Panic + guns. That’s what the NRA intentionally creates every day. It’s a perfect storm for the mass shootings we see in this country day in and day out. All thanks to the NRA.