OK, the
dozen or more guys casually packing assault weapons (or whatever their personal choice of firearm) at Obama events in Portsmouth and Phoenix have succeeded in getting our attention. We’re officially alarmed, even if the Secret Service isn’t.
They’re scarier than the furious crazies yelling in the faces of congressmen trying to conduct town halls on health care, even if, as they say, they have no intention of firing said weapons. That’s not just because they’re basically stalking a charismatic and controversial president (albeit without hope of getting within shooting range), or because you wouldn’t want to be within shooting range of them in a crowd (think Plaxico Burress).
It’s because they’re fucking with us—lurking around the president, loaded up, protected by ridiculous laws, provoking us, sending us some kind of testosterone-filled message: We’re not planning to go down quietly.
Some of them are surely in it for publicity, and it's working. A dapper-looking black guy in a white shirt and hipster glasses, with semi-automatic assault rifle strapped on like an outtake from a stylish assassination flick, says in a
YouTube video, "We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote."
C'mon, this guy is having his way with us. (Turns out, he toted his gun down specially for the interview with a
fellow Ron Paul supporter Ernest Hancock, also armed.) They all are. And we have to assume that none of them are planning to go all vigilante over a public option to compete against their health insurance plan. Their grievance is something bigger and vaguer. They're seeing an opportunity to put us on notice that they're not happy, and the gun is supposed to say that they're not the kind of guy you want to make unhappy. Several have made the point that they think more people should carry weapons to, say, political gatherings, so we’ll get the point that there are a lot of guys like them. Even if we do have a skinny black socialist smarty-pants for a president.
In an AP video, the gun-toter says he is "absolutely, totally against" health care reform, and that such a plan is tantamount to "stealing it from people." Here he mimics a lot of tea partiers: The “it,” I assume, being the taxes he thinks he will have to pay for universal coverage, or the health care he won’t get as much of if 40 million other people get a piece. Understandable anxiety, but not enough to act like you’re living in a post-apocalyptic movie fantasy where somebody is trying to forcibly separate you from your dwindling supply of food and water.
These militant patriot guys always talk about being robbed of rights, about things being
taken from them, threatening to go rogue rather than surrender to the next indignity. They're preposterous—they can only embarrass the gun movement—and surreal in their anachronistic sense of entitlement. But they give cover to the less outrageous health care opposition: You may think we're unreasonable, but at least we're not armed.
The scary thing is that no health care compromise is going to make these guys go away, because it isn't about health care. The biggest thing most of them have lost is the advantage being a white male has delivered for most of this country's history. But that's already slipped, and no weapon they can carry is going to bring it back. You can feel their pain, but you can't dismiss them, even if they're just playing at vigilantism. They're having a grand time making the rest of us uncomfortable—it's almost childish—and they need to be disarmed before they hurt someone.
Caroline Miller is the editor in chief of Newser. She can be reached at cmiller@newser.com.
