How the Supreme Court Gave the Capitol Insurrection a Green Light
In 2008, the court’s watershed Second Amendment decision made right-wing militias’ fantasies seem real
When I was a kid, more than twice as many Americans went hunting as they do now, and twice as many had guns. Now only one in four own a gun — but the average gun owner today doesn’t own a gun; they have several. In fact, just 3% of us own about half of America’s hundreds of millions of guns, an average of 17 apiece. And that’s because so many of those super-enthusiasts are in thrall to overheated and often delusional gun fantasies.
I’ve been thinking once again about our exceptional and suicidal gun culture. It wasn’t prompted by another mass shooting, some make-believe commando mowing down random Americans in some random American place, but by last month’s unprecedented violent mass spectacle at the U.S. Capitol. The January 6 episode was, blessedly, mostly gun-free — but it was the doing of people driven by the delusions and fantasies that for decades have driven the National Rifle Association and other unhinged gun fetishists, so many of whom were among the mob ransacking the Capitol.
As a kid, I had a rifle and shot targets and birds, and I still sometimes shoot skeet, so I have an inkling of the make-believe…
