Skip to main content

AR-15: The Must-Have Accessory for the Well-Dressed Republican

For decades, a standard tactic of anti-abortion activists was to display, in as much gruesome detail as possible, photos of aborted fetuses.

It was a vile tactic — an easy punch in the gut to the gullible and squeamish — but it’s hard to deny its effectiveness, or the inflammatory role it played in the culture wars. It was, in a way, a harbinger of the death of Roe v. Wade.

Revulsion, whether we like it or not, is a real political tactic. An extreme tactic, to be sure, but it has its uses. Hold that thought.

I’ve been hard on The Washington Post for years, and it continues to irk me in many ways, but it, too, has its uses. The Post is one of a vanishing breed, a news organization with both the resources and resourcefulness to publish the kind of essential series it dropped last week: a deep dive into what can only be called the culture of the AR-15 assault rifle.

The series covers that culture from multiple angles — from the town that makes the rifles, to the people who buy them, to the experiences of those who’ve sustained appalling personal damage, losing limbs, loved ones, or both to this hideous weapon.

There are an estimated twenty million AR-15s in this country right now. Each can fire upwards of thirty bullets every second. Each can take out a small crowd in less than a minute. And when I say “take out,” I mean many will die on the spot, many will die in the next few hours or days, and many will spend the rest of their lives in a private hell, dealing with a cascade of life-altering injuries nobody wants to think about.

Nor does anyone want to think about the crime scene itself. Photos from these massacres are never made public, either by the press or by law enforcement. You might see a picture of a child's shoe or a Barbie doll, but you’ll never see a body on camera.

What they’re shielding us from is the “carnage” — a word descended from the Latin for ‘meat’ — which is, more or less, what these killing rooms are covered with. Raw remnants of human beings, some of them shredded, some with skulls exploded, some with legs ripped off, some with internal organs pureed, some only recognizable through their DNA. A lot of them children.

We hear plenty about the shooter, who usually enjoys his fifteen minutes of fame posthumously. We get the three-day media circus, which gives the next shooter delusions of grandeur. We get the fevered search for "motive," as if that matters. We get capsule biographies of the dead. We get thoughts and prayers from Republicans, and impotent rage from everyone else.

So for our own sanity, we move on. We leave the school, the town, and its traumatized residents to lick their horrible wounds. And still we remain clueless about the severity of those wounds — both physical and mental — and about the long-term trauma that sets in for the victims, their families, and their communities.

We feel lucky to be insulated from the reality of the devastation. We feel grateful that it hasn't touched us. And we feel scared that one day it might.

The Post, to its credit, tries to give the horror more dimension — some of it eye-popping — than we'd usually see. They show us, via animated simulation,  what these guns can do to a human body, but they stop well short of actual footage of the carnage.

The only ones who get to see it are the ones who have no choice — first responders, ER nurses, cops on the scene, jurors who need to assess guilt or innocence. Once in a while, you’ll hear one open up about it, and you realize none of them will ever be the same, either. Call them secondary victims. In the words of one surgeon, the body tissue “literally just crumbled in your hand.”

So nobody wants to look, and you couldn't if you wanted to. But what if we had to? What if we were forced to confront the grisly reality? What if revulsion were what it finally takes to shame this vastly over-armed population into sanity? What if the people who own these weapons could be made to understand how obscenely destructive they are?

Just as protesters brandished posters of fetuses at women entering abortion clinics, what if the people working in AR-15 factories saw pictures of puddled humans as they arrive at work? What if gun retailers had to be exposed to mutilated bodies before they could sell a gun that mutilates bodies. What if you couldn’t buy an AR-15 without seeing the gore it so efficiently processes?

Sometimes, the tactics of revulsion make sense. Sometimes, you can reduce a thousand words to one stomach-churning picture.

And the people who most need their stomachs churned — the ones who most need to see the blood, bone, and brain tissue they've inflicted on society — are Republican legislators.

If you haven’t heard, GOP congressmen have turned the AR-15 into, of all things, a lapel pin. It’s now a cute little fashion accessory, something they can wear proudly and without irony, to proclaim their patriotism, or at least their readiness to kill for their country.

This has finally superseded the idiotic flag pins that were practically mandatory political props in the twenty years following 9/11. If you remember, Fox stirred up three days of shocked indignation when Obama was spotted once without one, thereby confirming his Kenyan citizenship.

But that was about the American flag, another subject for another day. And those flag pins were never more than a tacky bit of symbolism, simple-minded but harmless.

The symbolism of an AR-15 lapel pin is anything but harmless. Every congressman wearing one is a walking billboard for violence, subjugation, and fascism. Every public figure flaunting that gun has blood on their hands. The GOP is, in so many ways, the party of death.

So how do we deal with people so depraved, so devoid of humanity, so infinitely tolerant of the accelerating rate of AR-15 atrocities?

Well, one thing we can do is rub their faces in it. Every congressional hearing involving guns should, from now on, be a show-and-tell. Democrats should use their time to show the enablers, in graphic detail, exactly what they've enabled.

Republicans, whose knowledge of the Constitution begins and ends with the Second Amendment, should be haunted by these images forever. May they never get a good night's sleep again.

And next time a gun case comes before SCOTUS — whose justices are reputed to traffic in several other amendments — the lawyers should enter the courtroom with briefcases full of AR-15 porn.

All these people need to see the real-world consequences of their precious gun fetish. And they need to see it in dying color.

 


Comments

  1. This is such a timely article. Today’s trump news has overshadowed the big news that Desantis quietly signed a permitless concealed carry law for Florida. (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/ron-desantis-quietly-signs-permitless-concealed-carry-law-rcna77934). As a merchant, I’m just waiting for the day when a gun-toter walks into my store with his fashion statement that screams, “I am powerful. Look at me. I can kill you.” You say, “What if the people who own these weapons could be made to understand how obscenely destructive they are?” THEY DON’T CARE!

    I propose a new fashion for legislators and congress people: Armor and helmets as they sit (like the sitting ducks in American classrooms) in their chambers without the advantage of magnetometers so that they will have to deal, like the rest of us, with the madness outside their safety zones.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can't reason with these people. When classrooms of toddlers are massacred with assault rifles, they argue that the toddlers should be armed.

    I have a radical proposal. All elected Republicans must participate in a lottery. Whenever there is a shooting (death or not) of more than one person, a Republican is randomly selected to be euthanized. If they truly believe in America and the 2nd Amendment, they will willingly give their lives for them. We can even build a "Gun Martyr" monument for them. And NO ONE can sit out the lottery. Not Senators, not judges, not Presidents.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Joe Biden Isn’t Even Breathing Hard

Joe Biden hit it out of the park last week. His State of the Union speech, most agree, was pitch perfect. Even some Republicans, even some Fox pundits, even a toxic tool like Rick Santorum had to stretch to find something to quibble with, though not for lack of trying. Biden eviscerated Trump without once mentioning him by name. He castigated the Supreme Court, with all the due respect they weren’t due. He finessed the Middle East. He stood up for reproductive rights that his Catholic upbringing never allowed for. He taunted Republicans for their naked hypocrisy on immigration, called them out for their betrayal of Ukraine, and got righteously pissed off at what he’s too polite to call an attempted Christo-fascist coup. All this while demonstrating, quite convincingly, that eighty is the new sixty. What came through for me, most of all, was how much he gets off on this. You could see it in that stroll through the very venue that was his workplace for most of hi

The Trouble with Being Born

  In a red state, it’s no great privilege to be born. Certainly not from a legal standpoint. Republican-run governments are highly protective of the unborn, and are now extending legal protection to frozen embryos, at least in Alabama. If you happen to be one of those far-from-born organisms, you now enjoy all the rights of a living child. It’s when you get yourself born that things get complicated. Not that you would then lose those rights, just that they’d be widely ignored, poorly enforced, and cynically violated. But as long as you stay unborn, you’ve got lots of rights you don’t need. In Alabama — a theocracy-in-waiting — the entire nine months of your gestation are now protected by law, and violations of that law will be subject to investigation and enforcement. Logic would now say that if you, a formerly frozen embryo, were to die anywhere along that timeline, a charge of murder could be brought against anyone who might be seen as responsible. The crime

The Golden Age of Both-Siderism is Upon Us

Two things to consider going forward: One, Biden is way more popular than the mainstream media would have you believe. Two, Trump is way less popular than the mainstream media would have you believe. The common denominator here is the mainstream media, who seem bent on ushering the well-honed “both sides are bad” narrative into a golden age. The more Trump descends into a Shakespearean sort of madness, and the more the Republican party follows him into the abyss, the more the press will strain to find something, anything, that makes Democrats look equally bad. It isn’t easy, but this is their formula and they’re sticking to it. They stuck to it all through the 2022 midterms — remember the Red Wave? — and ended up looking like inept fools. There is no sign that they’ve learned anything from that. And it’s not just about their stories, or the deceptive spin they put on their headlines. It’s also about their dishonest use of polls. When The New York Times releases a poll sho