Forum / Is Happiness a Warm Gun? Or Does a Cold One Work as Well?

Gary Hardaway
Dec 16, 05:53pm

Some people have an erotic attachment to weapons- guns, especially. It is very strange and disturbing to hear the obsessive, passionate, descriptions by gun fanciers of the objects of their affection. I hear such pornographies of weaponry far too often. Nothing good comes of such relationships. Targets always end up torn and deformed in grotesque figures of submission whether bottles and cans, paper and ink silhouettes, twelve point bucks, or six year old children. Like rape, the use of a gun is about power as the apotheosis of desire. Our language itself eroticizes conquest and subjection. I don’t know if we will ever escape the fundamental horror of being human. Language is the software of human intelligence and one can never escape the domination of Mother Tongue. I despair.

Gloria Garfunkel
Dec 16, 06:31pm

The pornography of weaponry is such an important insight. How would gun lovers feel manly without their gigantic penises that snuff out life in a split second, a whole complex human being. What an orgasm of power. I'm convinced it is built into our genes. After guns, it will be nukes. We are pre-programmed to self-destruct. Ah, Allah, Buddha, God, Shiva and Vishnu: you are all either complicit or helpless to take back the genie of violence, sadism, guns and nuclear power. Or you just don't give a shit. We were a bad experiment gone awry. Or you don't exist, nor will our stupid ideas about your help exist when we blow all ourselves to hell either. It's sickening. Also, gambling and alcohol and now even computers care considered addictions. Why don't we call it what it is: Gun Addiction. Except it's more active and compulsive and dangerous. And people can choose to quit.

Gloria Garfunkel
Dec 16, 06:35pm

It's power addiction, just like money. And those who flip from compulsion to obsession, those are rhe ones to watch.

Gary Hardaway
Dec 16, 08:09pm

What's nature vs. nurture becomes excruciatingly complex. Isn't there a pill for all this ritualized blood lust yet?

Gloria Garfunkel
Dec 16, 10:29pm

Paychologically, I really think there is both a power and a sadistic sexual impotence aspect to the problem. Look at the shape of all guns. I mean, would they be such a problem if they were shaped like frisbees?

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Dec 16, 11:13pm

I'm a native Texan so I know more than I ever wanted to know about guns. Grew up around them. I have so many gun stories. My favorite is the night I wanted to kill myself. I looked all over the house for my step-dad's pistol. Couldn't find it so I just washed down some allergy pills with a bottle of wine and half a bottle of vodka.

Also, when I was in basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina I loved shooting my M16. I got a sharpshooter medal. That was one of the highlights of my life.

Sad. I know.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Dec 16, 11:15pm

p.s. was listening to the white album this morning at YouTube..."Happiness is a Warm Gun" remains my favorite Beatles song..."A Day in the Life" is a close second

Gary Hardaway
Dec 17, 12:25am

Being a native Texan with too little courage to escape, I understand the unintended depth of your gun knowledge. My favorite Beatles' song is whatever one I hear next unless it's Revolution #9 which is far too Cagey for me.

Ann Bogle
Dec 17, 03:49am

Is it hoped that the word "addiction" will cause "the addict" to be shunned? Is shunning a powerful response? (Yes.) Whom do "privately"-educated Catholic-American women shun? Misogynist gun holders?

Ann Bogle
Dec 17, 06:18am

Gary Hardaway, that's a great kickoff. Miss Misti, hey, girl. What if all the women died? Then what? Would it be yellow hills--as it would be if all the men died--feminist utopian vision projected (in air of a rooming house, where they talked, and I listened, imagining their talk): world without men, yellow hills. Those women were peaceful. They didn't have guns. People said they were militant.

Linda Simoni-Wastila
Dec 17, 12:26pm

Great kick-off. Happiness is a warm gun. I think it means a smoking, used gun, versus one stuck in the closet.

Yes, there is the feminist slant about guns and dicks. But I don't think that all gun-packers view themselves as penis extensions: more than 40% of women in one poll reported owning a gun: http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/self-reported-gun-ownership-highest-1993.aspx

Though another poll by CNN puts that figure at 1 in 10: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/31/politics/gun-ownership-declining/index.html

What is known is fewer people are buying guns, but those who do buy more than one.

Our homes are becoming arsenals, mini-militias. Scary.

stephen hastings-king
Dec 17, 01:45pm

Not everyone who likes guns indulges the neo-fascist gun-cult either rhetorically or personally. There are people who like to make holes in targets from a distance, and others who like to go hunting...These distinctions seemed quite abstract to me when I lived in cities, but here in Tiny Town I can see the difference.

The neo-fascist gun cult equates possession of a weapon with political consciousness--it makes you free--it makes you powerful in a space of powerlessness---it will enable you to fend of any number of Evil Others who might want to Take Your Stuff, be it the Bad Home Invaders, the ATF or the UN with its black helicopters that shuttles soldiers around from Belgium who are just waiting for the opportunity to reduce you to slavery. There's a narcissism to this, not only in its separation of conditions and outcomes when it serves as the basis for thinking about gun regulation for example, but more directly in the assumption that seems to follow that everything would be OK if everyone were like me, self-interested, paranoid, strapped, ultra-rightwing--and it's reverse in the suspicion of the Imaginary Other. In that discursive context, there's lots of rich soil gun porn. Rich soil is often rich because it, too, is full of shit.

So yeah, there's gun porn and carnage porn and their banalized popcult counterparts of the sort my nephews like to indulge during their down time, sitting on a couch massacring imaginary others in great number on the TV the size of Rhode Island while eating ice cream. When I see them at it, I will say "Doing some killing?" and they'll tell me to watch this....I don't know what that stuff does quite. I find it very very strange.

Gary Hardaway
Dec 17, 02:33pm

Women with guns- non-surgically transgendered?

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Dec 17, 09:32pm

Hi Ann...I am going to Google "yellow hills utopia" now.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Dec 17, 09:33pm

http://www.utopiatexas.info/

There's a Utopia, Texas?!
Hahahaha. There's my laugh for the day.

Gary Hardaway
Dec 18, 03:26am

Utopia, TX looks like a great place to visit but a difficult place to find work.
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