Handheld Killing Machines and the Age of Gun Groomers
On a day when the USA suffers another mass shooting at a school, Brad talks about the symbolism of the AR 15, the sickness of wanting to provide absolute access to handheld killing machines, and the ways America's children are groomed into a cult of death.
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Axis Mundi You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
And it's been kind of a weird day, y'all.
I had some interviews scheduled and some other things, and those got postponed.
And it's also the day that another mass shooting happened here in the United States.
March 27, 2023, a young woman walked into a private elementary school in Nashville.
And ended the lives of three children and three adults.
I was at a facility, a daycare gym, where I take my daughter sometimes when I read the news.
And basically, I'm able to drop her off at the daycare for a couple hours and do some work.
And I was sitting there and reading it, like many parents.
Over how many decades in this country?
It hit me as I was sitting there that basically Doesn't matter where you are, daycare, church, school, Walmart, the park, doesn't matter.
We live in a country where this can happen.
So I want to talk about that today and some of the aspects that I think are involved.
So I think my thoughts might be a little bit raw and this might be a little bit of a winding monologue.
So hang with me and hopefully we'll find a coherent thread in here somewhere.
So, since Columbine, there have been over 370 mass shootings in the country at schools.
So, let me say that again, 376 school shootings since Columbine in the 1980s, 1990s, and roughly 350,000 students have been directly impacted.
And roughly 350,000 students have been directly impacted.
This is coming from the Washington Post.
We, in essence, over the last generation have had an entire generation that has been affected by gun violence.
We've had 376 school shootings in about three decades.
So I'll put that there to start.
We live in a country that has something like 70 million guns in the hands of civilians.
So I want to hit on two main points.
And like I said, I may be just a little raw today.
So hang with me.
The first one goes back to something that happened a couple weeks ago, and that is Jon Stewart had an interview with Oklahoma State Senator Nathan Daum.
And I'm sure many of you saw it, and it was a clip that went viral, and it felt like a gotcha moment for many people on the left.
And I understand that, and sometimes it feels good to have those moments.
What I want to zero in on is the very last line that is often showed from that interview where Nathan Daum says that there should be restrictions on drag queen performances and that they should not be allowed by law near children.
And Jon Stewart asks him, is this not an infringement of free speech?
And Dom responds and says, well, the government has a responsibility in some cases to protect children.
And that's when you can see, uh, you know, Stewart just sort of lose his cool and he's, he's, his emotion is really bristling in every fiber of his body.
And he goes on to point out that.
The deadliest killer of children in the country is guns.
And the importance of that moment, and it's easy to miss in the kind of gotcha setting and the setting of the clip that goes viral and passed around from here to there.
Here's what's really important to me about that clip is that Nathan Dom spends 10 minutes Talking about how the Second Amendment should not be infringed upon in any way.
He's a Second Amendment absolutist in the sense that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.
So he's against background checks.
He's against extra measures that would make it more difficult.
He's against registration.
And Jon Stewart goes through all these examples of you have to register for a car and all this stuff to drive a car and so on and so forth.
And then Stuart brings up drag queens and he, and Nathan Dom says, well, sometimes the government has a duty to protect children.
And so what, what, and if you break this down, what Nathan Dom is saying is the first amendment, which is the freedom of speech can be infringed upon.
Uh, you can, uh, not allow drag queens to perform near children by law, even if those children, uh, have parental consent, even if the parents want them to be in a, uh, in a, in a place where there's a drag queen performance or a drag queen story hour, by law, the government should not allow that.
However, according to Dom, the government shall not infringe upon the right to bear arms in any way.
And you can see there, if you just slow down for a minute and you get away from the gratification of Jon Stewart got him, what's really at stake, right?
Is this man saying that here's what children need to be protected from, and this is where the government should step in.
And this is something that we talk about on this show a lot.
That conservatism in the contemporary GOP is not about small government.
It's about selectively big government.
And it's selective because the government is envisioned as having a really important role when it comes to infringing upon people's rights.
If that means not allowing children to attend a drag queen story hour, if that means banning books, that means taking certain books out of the library.
That means rephrasing lessons about Rosa Parks to say that she stood up for what was right, rather than she stood up against racial injustice or racism.
There's a desperate need in that Republican and Christian nationalist mind for government intervention in so many places.
I haven't even mentioned reproductive rights and abortion.
However, when it comes to guns, the attitude is, We will not infringe upon those rights in any way.
That that is not a place that we want any kind of regulation.
And you can see there the sickness of this.
You can see there that like sick and twisted logic.
That somehow this is the sacred right that will have no conditions, no limits.
We all were taught as kids that you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater.
And the lesson of that is that your First Amendment rights are not absolute.
There are limits.
There are places where you actually cannot say whatever you want because it is a danger to others, because it's a danger to the common good, because it does not create a public space where one might be safe.
But we live in a country where you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater.
But in many places you can bring a firearm into a crowd of theater and people like Nathan Dom and many others want to tell you that somehow that makes sense.
Today, Charlie Kirk tweeted that we should not ban assault rifles.
We should ban gender affirming care for children.
And once again, intentionally or not, he sums up the absolute sick logic at play here.
That the way to take care of children is not to allow them to express themselves in terms of how they feel in their own body, but to allow for an unregulated, unpilfered amount of AR-15s and other handheld killing machines in public.
Because supposedly that is what will keep them safe as children.
And as Jon Stewart pointed out in that very famous interview, The number one killer of children in the country is handheld killing machines.
So the logic and the data doesn't make sense.
And it really points to a sickness.
And here's where I'll say that we just live in a country where handheld killing machines are a sacred idol.
And I've said this on the podcast before, if you've been listening to this show since the beginning, you know that.
If you just started listening, let me say it again.
If you stop calling a gun a gun and you just start calling it a handheld killing machine, because a gun has no other purpose other than to kill people or maim them or hurt them.
And that could be people, it could be animals, if you're hunting, so on and so forth.
But the purpose of a gun is to kill.
If you're successful with what you're doing, you kill.
So when somebody says, well, what are we going to do?
Outlaw planes?
Are we going to outlaw cars?
Those kill people too.
There's two responses.
One, they're highly regulated.
I fly all the time and I have to take off my shoes and go through metal detectors and check in and show my ID.
I have to get my driver's license renewed.
I have to do all kinds of stuff.
Wear a seatbelt, whatever, we can talk all about it.
But here's the other thing.
Neither guns nor planes are, have the sole purpose Of killing.
They exist for reasons other than to kill.
They exist to transport people from one place to another.
Guns have no other function.
They are handheld killing machines.
So what Nathan Dahm and other representatives, along with the Charlie Kirks of the world, want you to think is that we should have an uninhibited, absolute right to handheld killing machines.
But we should not have that when it comes to taking care of our children in the ways that they would like to exist in their bodies, when it comes to reproductive rights, when it comes to the books that they might read at school, and so on and so on and so on.
One of the questions Jon Stewart asked in that interview, and I think is actually worth asking again is, So when will we be safe?
We have tens of millions of guns in civilian hands.
The AR-15, which I'm going to get to in a minute, is, uh, all over the country.
I mean, it is, if you go to a gun show or a gun store, it is the featured item.
And as the Washington Post pointed out just this morning in a ridiculously long feature about the AR-15.
It is now a symbol.
It's a symbol for, uh, pro handheld killing machine activists, uh, about what they want.
And for others, it's a symbol of terror.
But the question that Stuart asked, and I think it's just worth bringing up again, when will we be safe?
When, if we have 70 million guns in civilian hands, will we be safe when we have 80 million guns?
90 million?
900 million?
When are we going to be safe?
This brings me to a second point, and it's something that I've talked about on this show before.
One of the reasons it's so difficult to talk about handheld killing machines and the Second Amendment in this country is because there's so much emotion involved.
For many of us, myself included, it's emotional on days like this to think about children in schools running for their lives, children in Uvalde, children in Nashville, children anywhere being Terrorized by handheld killing machines and to have some of them lose their lives.
It's one of those things that stops you in your tracks, right?
I do this for a living.
I read new stories and papers and articles and journals and books all day every day as an academic and as somebody who does this show.
But these moments when you're sitting a hundred feet from where your kid's in daycare and you're trying to do catch up on some emails and you read this news, they stop you in your tracks.
They put a lump in your throat.
You can't breathe for a minute.
Tears flow because it's so emotional to think about something like this happening.
The emotion surrounding handheld killing machines makes any kind of debate really fraught because inevitably one side will be emotionally invested in how these things are terrorizing us and the other will be emotionally invested in protecting them.
And I think it's worth talking about why.
And I've talked about this on the show before, but let's do it again.
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In the United States, handheld killing machines, guns, are symbols.
And they've been symbols for a long time.
And for some people, they are symbols of safety.
And that is why the Nathan Doms of the world, and the Charlie Kirks, and many others, when they see an AR-15, they see something that protects them.
And this has a long history.
It has a long history in white supremacy.
It has a long history going back to the slave plantations in the American South, where those with the weapons were able to control and terrorize others into obedience and enslavement.
It has a long history with after the Civil War when police forces and what I should say is the antecedents to modern police forces were put in place before the Civil War to track down runaway enslaved people.
And after the Civil War, when white men often armed themselves in order to protect themselves and their wives and their families from newly freed black men.
It was a sense in which white people have felt threatened by others, whether they be black people, whether they be immigrants, whether they be those in the American West who were Native Americans or Mexican.
It's a way for safety and protection and control.
Talk about it all the time in my classes and on the show, but if you read Gorski and Perry, Flag and the Cross, they argue that white Christian nationalism is about three things.
It's about freedom for white people by ordering the social dimension in a proper way where they are on top.
And if they need to, they will use violence to make sure that the social order is properly aligned.
The gun, the handheld killing machine, is a huge part of that.
White evangelicals have the most favorable view of guns of any religious group in the country, and they have more guns than any other religious group in the country, per capita, per person.
It's not an accident that the white Christian nationalists would see the gun as something that protects them, that keeps them safe from all those people that are always trying to get them, to change the nation, to reverse the order of how things should be.
The gun for them symbolizes protection, and there's ample evidence of this.
I often cite an article from the University of Pennsylvania Law Review by Kahan and Brahman, Who show us that, that when it comes to the idea of a gun, for many white folks, the gun symbolizes safety, protection and heritage, something that you pass down from, from, from person to person, from generation to generation.
And I'm going to come back to that in a second.
But for many others, The handheld killing machine symbolizes terror.
It symbolizes control.
It symbolizes an attempt to scare them into getting in line when certain authorities want them to.
For many others, the handheld killing machine has nothing to do with safety.
It has everything to do with danger.
It has everything to do with fear.
And that really brings me to a piece in the Washington Post today that talks about that AR-15.
The piece was, in a matter of amazing timing, posted just this morning.
And here's a little bit of it.
The AR-15 has gained a polarizing hold on the American imagination.
Its unmistakable silhouette is used as a political statement, emblazoned on t-shirts and banners.
So a couple of things.
He introduces this bill in Black History Month.
That's one.
silver lapel pins.
One Republican lawmaker, Representative Barry Moore of Alabama, introduced a bill in February to declare the AR-15 the national gun of America.
So a couple of things.
He introduces this bill in Black History Month.
That's one.
Number two, he thinks that the country needs a national handheld killing machine.
I want you to think about the cultures and places you've studied in history.
How many of them would have lionized the weapon so much that they would have had a national handheld killing machine or a national something.
Something to think about.
Number two, and our friend Annika Brockschmidt has written about this, to have a lapel pin With an AR-15 on it is really a manifestation of the sick logic I talked about a few minutes ago.
The idea that this is something you believe in so much, the AR-15, that you would wear a pin on your blazer next to the American flag.
A place where people might wear a pin about surviving cancer or, you know, some other traumatic thing they've gone through.
A place where you might have a pin related to breast cancer or diabetes or lymphoma or whatever we may talk about.
Here you're wearing one of a handheld killing machine.
A machine designed to kill as many things as possible in a short amount of time as possible.
The post goes on to talk about how 10 of the 17 deadliest mass killings in the US since 2012 and involved AR-15s.
Las Vegas, 60 dead.
Newtown, Connecticut, 27.
Newtown was, of course, at a school.
Sutherland Springs, Texas, 25.
Uvalde, at a school, last year, 21.
Parkland, Florida, a school, 17.
San Bernardino, Aurora, Pittsburgh, Boulder, Buffalo.
Now, one of the things that I think the post article rightfully points out Is that the AR-15 is a symbol.
So if I just talked about the handheld killing machine in general, as a symbol, the AR-15 has really become a symbol for the 21st century.
Here's what they say.
This transformation from made-for-combat weapon to mass-market behemoth and cultural flashpoint is the product of a sustained and intentional effort that has forged an American icon.
A Washington Post investigation found that the AR-15's rise to dominance over the past two decades was sparked by a dramatic reversal in strategy by the country's biggest gun companies to invest in a product that many in the industry saw as anathema to their culture and traditions.
We made it look cool, one person said, the same reason you buy a Corvette.
Think about that.
The goal was to make a handheld killing machine that can end the lives of dozens and dozens of people in only a matter of a minute into something akin to a Corvette.
Chris Murphy, who is a senator from Connecticut and has been an outspoken anti-handheld killing machine member of Congress since Newtown, says this, the protection of the AR-15 has become the number one priority of the gun lobby.
It makes it harder to push the issue on the table because the gun lobby does so much messaging around it.
So the AR-15 is now something that emblematizes cool, It emblematizes masculinity.
It emblematizes might and strength.
Like I said, when you go to a gun show or you look in a gun shop, that's what you see.
It's no accident that the sale of AR-15s soared in the run-up to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and after the mass killings at Newtown in 2012.
Today, the post says the industry estimates that at least 20 million AR-15s are stored and stashed around the country.
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine that we have more AR, we have four times more AR-15s in this country than there are people in Denmark?
That we want to be a country that has a national gun?
What does that say about us?
All right, y'all.
I want to talk about one more thing, and that is the idea of a groomer.
We've been hearing a lot about groomers in this country for the last year and a half or two years, and it is a organized, targeted campaign against the LGBT community.
Those on the American right, Christian nationalists, have started to label anyone who is part of the LGBT community as groomers.
They have tried to link homosexuality or bisexuality or being trans as being inherently a groomer.
And they have taken to this to the point where You know, Disney movies and shirts that are hanging in Target are being labeled groomer paraphernalia, right?
You see this happening when it comes to schools and school board discussions, when it comes to banning books and what kind of things should be taught in curricula.
The idea is, is that teachers and librarians and the radical left and George Soros and Joe Biden, they all are grooming your kid.
Uh, you know, in, in, in sexualizing children.
Okay.
And once again, let's just make sure we get it clear.
This all plays on this idea of safety and control.
It all plays on this idea that someone is coming to get you and you have to have handheld killing machines and you have to stand up and yell at PTA meetings because you just can't have people coming for your wives and children.
Okay, that's the idea.
But I think there's something worth talking about today in light of what happened and that is the fact that so many of the Congress people who talk about groomers are the Congress people who gladly show their Christmas cards every year where they're standing with their kids holding handheld killing machines.
So these are the people that will say that they don't want it to be allowed for 10 or 14 or 16 year olds to talk about sex or sexuality, gender, or anything else in public schools.
But they're also the people that will gladly tell you That you should teach your 8-year-old son or daughter, your 10-year-old son or daughter, how to shoot a handheld killing machine, how to hold a Glock, how to be an accurate rifleman, how to hold and reload an AR-15.
So these are folks that are going to say, groomer, groomer, groomer, when it comes to talking about gender-affirming care.
When it comes to having honest and healthy discussions about sexuality, human development, gender, when kids are asking and wondering about how these things work and what to do about them in their adolescence.
They want to protect, they want to infantilize, and they want to call you a groomer because you're somehow infringing upon their family's ability to raise their kids how they want.
But there are also people that when you get their Christmas card, they got three smiling kids and a mom and a dad, each holding a handheld killing machine.
And I'm not sure how helpful this is.
And I know I'm feeling raw.
I'm not sure that this is going to lead anywhere, but it's just days like this, you have to say it.
Those are the groomers.
They're the ones who groom their children into killing machines from the youngest of ages.
They're the ones that idolize handheld killing machines in shrines in their homes.
They're the ones that deify machines whose only purpose it is is to end life.
That's grooming.
That's teaching a way of life that's based on death.
So the next time Uncle Ron talks about groomers, the next time Uncle Ron says, Hey, I'm not sure I want my kid hearing about LGBT characters or, uh, you know, having to, to learn about Japanese incarceration.
I guess for me, you know, one of the responses is, well, this is a country that's totally willing.
To teach people about a cult of death.
I don't know why it's so afraid to teach people all the beautiful, complex ways that humans try to live.
It's just really hard to look at, you know, the congressman who represents Nashville and his Christmas card is one of him and his family holding handheld killing machines.
Lauren Boebert, the same thing.
We could go on down the line.
AR-15 lapel pins, Christmas cards with handheld killing machines, a national gun.
I don't know, man.
That sounds like grooming to me.
I hope y'all are coping.
I hope y'all are finding ways to get involved, to activate, to write letters and postcards, to gather together and not give up.
Because on days like this, it really does feel like that would be the easier thing to do.
We appreciate you all.
We hope that you'll visit us online at StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com.
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