Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Knuckleheads to Dine at South Lincoln Eatery

I'm of two minds about this.  On the one hand I suppose that; for so long as private gun ownership is going to be widespread and there are going to be those who insist on taking their guns everywhere, that open-carry is preferable to conceal-carry.  It's struck me that the recent trend of concealed-carry laws do nothing to advance 'gun rights' per se; not even by the most absolutist interpretation of the 2nd amendment, but rather were carried out so that gun fetishists could be reassured by social authorities that gun ownership was socially normative, and that furthermore white rural culture, or rather an idealized fantasy of it, was the eternal American archetype. So yes, if you're going to tote your gun around, please keep it in the open so that I'll know.  It's not as if I was going to piss on your alfredo or anything like that anyway.

Yet at the same time I found myself stricken by this organization's ground rules for the open carry dinner.   "no camouflage or all-black clothing -- keep guns holstered and not bring rifles or drink alcohol." 

I'll be careful to not equate legal gun owners with terrorists here.  Still I'd say that if one deliberately dresses himself 'like a terrorist'; camouflage, ski mask, flag or banner proclaiming the Great Cause of whatever, and of course big-ass gun cradled like an infant, a deliberate intent to intimidate others would be rather obvious and challenged by no one, least of all Short-Fusey himself.  If this group wants to present wearing a gun in public as innately non-threatening, as seems to be the case; then why acknowledge that certain sartorial choices are understood as intended to frighten while asserting that openly wearing artery-shredding weapons carry no such implication.  Why not rifles anyway?  Why not alcohol anyway?  It's true that drinking any amount at all while handling a lethal weapon is bad and banning such a thing within any shooting group is a very basic measure of good sense.  Still if you forbid drinking while carrying, as of course you should; then why go to a restaurant.  I don't like restaurants myself.  I dislike being confined in a space where I'm expected to converse for minutes or even hours on end.  Still I understand that the pleasure that people get from having booze served to them while they eat, (whatever that pleasure is) is a primary reason for why people go to restaurants.   

It comes down again to an imagined and insecure need to be the American Prototype felt by people who know deep down that they are no such thing and that there is no such thing.  People have always gone to restaurants to get mildly buzzed while they get full.  Bringing one's gun to Chez XYZ's has always been understood as a foolish thing to do and had never been common.  And just as the manly-ass old west had much stricter gun control than we do today these people must know that there is no American birthright to be an evil-slaying knight-errant and that no generation of American men has ever been or wanted to be such a thing.  Still I hope they enjoy their dinner at this HF Crave, whatever sort of place that foreign south end establishment might be. 

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