Don't fall for the fiction that guns are political

Armed men at capitol buildings aren't protesters. They are there to make war.

New York Times photo by Mark Peterson

The New York Times has an article in the Sunday Magazine this week called “Out of the barrel of a gun.”  The sub-head is “In Virginia, armed protests are creating a new kind of politics,” and though the article itself is otherwise an excellent take on these radical white supremacist assholes  who show up at state capitals outfitted and armed like Little Lord Rambos, the way the Times chose to pitch its headline is all wrong.

The piece is about an abortive demonstration by “gun owners” at the Virginia state Capitol on the state’s annual “Lobby Day,” a recent addition to the government’s agenda, held annually on Martin Luther King day, January 20.  The Democratically controlled legislature has taken up a raft of gun control measures in the last year or so, including passing a so-called “red flag” law, which allows police to confiscate weapons from anyone deemed by a judge to be a risk to public safety. What you might call the gun-nut population was not amused, although a recent Washington Post poll revealed that 82 percent of Virginians support the law, including 72 percent of Republicans.

In the run-up to “Lobby Day,” various gun rights groups and right-wing militias like the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Boogaloo Boys announced plans for a mass march of gun owners on the Virginia state Capitol.  Coming just two weeks after the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington D.C., Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, wasn’t having it, and put the state Capitol grounds on lock down.

By the time “Lobby Day” arrived, the mass demonstration of gun owners had petered out, and as the Times reported, only a scattering of so-called “protestors” showed up outside a parking garage near the Capitol, all of them attired, as the Times described them, “in their thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment,” and carrying various iterations of the AR-15 and M-4 style semi-automatic rifles.  One of them, in a photograph by Mark Peterson, is pictured above, from the Times article.

I don’t know where to begin about the idiot in the photo.  The skull symbol from “The Punisher” comic books, displayed I presume as some kind of sign of machismo, is emblazoned on articles of clothing and equipment by the Three Percenters militia and the Boogaloo Boys, among other maniacally inclined groups of right-wing loons.  You can see it here on ammunition magazines this individual is carrying, along with several Leatherman folding tool knives.  Then there is, of course, the M-4 military style semi-automatic rifle, but what I love are the camouflaged protective combat gloves the imitation combat-man is wearing.  Just for the record, I was a highly trained rifleman in the Army, attaining the Expert Marksman’s badge on the M-16, and so was my brother Frank, and so was my father Lucian III.  And I want you to know that not one of us ever put on a pair of camo combat gloves of any kind.  They weren’t army issue back then, and I don’t think they’re army issue today, although I could be wrong.  But man, are they popular with the dime store rangers of the Proud Boys and Boogaloos and Three Percenters!

The article is excellent on the militia types, and is quite articulate about their utter lack of articulateness when it comes to who they are, and why they’re there, and what they believe. One 20-year-old Boogaloo Boy named Mike Dunn, who claimed to be a “former Marine,” was confronted with the fact that the Virginia legislature had passed the “red flag” law by a majority and a huge percentage of Virginians supported it and asked if passage of the law wasn’t an authentic expression of the will of the voters.  “No, because anybody can go against the will of the people,” he answered.  “People who represent us can still choose to go against us.” 

Huh?

But the Times’ representation of armed protestors as “creating a new kind of politics” is just wrong.  “Possessing a gun doesn’t protect free speech, as gun rights activists often claim,” the author, Charles Homans, concludes.  “The gun is the speech.”

I beg to disagree.  The kind of gun these goons are walking around carrying at state capitols around the country like Michigan and Virginia has only one purpose:  to kill people.  The so-called “gun owners” like Boogaloo Mike Dunn and his buddies depicted in the Times aren’t protesters.  They’re intimidators.  They don’t want to be listened to, because they don’t really have anything to say, certainly not in any way that can be understood politically, as evidenced above.  What they want to do is threaten people.  In the case of the Boogaloos in Virginia and the armed rioters on January 6 at our nation’s Capitol, they want to intimidate legislators in the act of performing the duties of government they were elected to perform.

That’s not “a new kind of politics.”  It’s an old kind of war.