Attendees browse through weapons displayed on the show floor during the 2022 Annual Meetings and Exhibits at the George R. Brown Convention Center Friday, May 27, 2022 in Houston.We always hear gun-rights absolutists define their position in the most practical terms.
No matter how many mass shootings we have in this country — and we’ve had more than 230 this year, including the May 24 elementary-school massacre in Uvalde which killed 19 children and two teachers — zealous gun enthusiasts won’t bend. More than anything, guns are a deeply embedded piece of our culture for reasons that have little to do with the intentions of Founding Fathers who lived in an era of muskets and thought in terms of private militias that might need to rise up against an oppressive federal government — just as the American colonists had risen up against British rule.
It’s a country where a 2022 candidate for the U.S. Senate — Arizona Republican Jim Lamon — produced an ad in which he appears as an Old West sheriff and fires his pistol at actors portraying Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Mark Kelly, the incumbent senator whose wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was critically injured in a 2011 shooting.
In the same ain’t-guns-cute vein, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, during his 2018 campaign, put out an ad in which he introduces a teenage boy who Kemp says is “interested in one of my daughters.”The ad ends with the charming image of Kemp pointing his shotgun at the teenager — in the classic American I-just-might-have-to-shoot-my-daughter’s-date-tonight tradition.