A few thoughts on what went down yesterday in D.C.

We're not sure if the President grasped just what the Senate (gun) control bill that went down in stunning defeat Wednesday evening was all about.



The President proved he could get elected President and then re-elected in a national race after uttering his "bitter-clinger" statement which was demonstrable of his condescension towards broad swaths of the American public. However, despite using his bully-pulpit of the highest office in the land and shamelessly exploiting the families of the Newtown victims, the President failed to grasp this was more of a local or regional issue and certainly more of a culture issue than he realized.


A recent Gallup poll showed that only 4% of Americans viewed gun control as the most pressing issue facing this country despite the fact that a majority of Americans favor more comprehensive background checks proving only that 96% of Americans don't really care that they themselves favor stronger background checks. (No shocker that the economy, jobs, dissatisfaction with government and government deficit/debt, in that order, topped the poll, so we assume the strategy here is that if you've failed miserably in addressing American's most pressing concerns, you just keep moving down the list until you hit legislative paydirt).


But back to this issue of culture and its many facets and interpretations. We scratch our heads when he hear the term "gun culture" Gun culture. We have no idea what that means. Are they talking about the gun culture of the inner city where gun play is glorified in music and which occurs in areas with the strictest gun control laws in the land? Or are they talking about the gun culture of pick-ups and gun racks that pretty much exists, geographically speaking, in 95% of the country excluding the D.C.-NYC-Boston corridor and that strip on the West Coast west of Interstate 5? We're not sure because gun culture has never been adequately defined for us.


Given that, we're left to assume that gun culture is merely a sloppy and scatter-shot short-hand pejorative used towards gun owners by gun control folks who don't know into what they are wading. And this is why the Senate (gun) control bill was doomed.


We can't link to it right now but there was an essay two or three weeks ago that was representative of a broader theme that has emerged recently regarding mass shootings in America and it is this: what's up with white males and why isn't there any examination of the white male culture that apparently leads to these shootings? A lazy and sloppy broad-brushing that we've come to expect from the (gun) control lobby but we give them credit for at least being in the ballpark.


What needs to be examined is the middle and upper middle class progressive, participation trophy culture to which we have subjected our white suburban males for the past 30 or so years and which may very well be a contributing factor in these shootings. In a nutshell: are we going to sit here and say those goofy win or lose, post-game victory tunnels do anything to prepare our children for the kick-in-the-teeth that life really is? Is it beyond the realm of possibility to wonder that after a lifetime of coddle culture (see, we can play the game, also), young, post-adolescent males that may be mentally afflicted, lose it when they find that their life no longer matches that vision given to them by their high school self-esteem coach? No one seems to be looking in that direction, which, perversely enough, is proof of its potential viability.


Accepting the premise of the coddle culture, it's not a stretch, then, to imagine much of America described above looking at the horrific slaughter that occurred in Newtown and thinking that's a "them" problem and not a "we" or "us" problem. Did not Adam Lanza get exposed to enough ass-kickings out on the baseball diamond or soccer field to give him a taste of the real world?


A couple of weeks back, when the imbecilic Joe Biden made the crack about the "black helicopter crowd" and how Special Ops were going to swoop down and take our guns, it confirmed in our mind this: we have never seen an administration hold more contempt towards its fellow citizens than this one. Again, you can win national elections after "bitter-clinger" remarks but you are not winning the hearts and minds of the electorate on more focused issues when you hold condescension towards law-abiding Americans who happen to own guns. And as social media has proved, those same law-abiding gun owners will become even less willing to be open to any sort of (gun) control legislation when they are charged with being complicit in the slaughters in Virginia Tech, Aurora and Newtown.

,
Yes, there were certainly political considerations as defecting Democratic Senators were from rural states with large gun-owning populations but this was against a larger backdrop of a cultural battle and the President's petulance at the press conference yesterday revealed that it wasn't just a political battle he lost but a cultural one as well where the statist worldview of "do something... anything" in the wake of crisis lost out to a world view that is, frankly, weary of panic management by a culture that has nothing but disdain for them and, unfortunately, this is something the President, because he leads such an insular existence, will never figure out.


This wasn't so much about guns but about a public tired of being bullied and harried by the political class of this country that will stop at nothing to reshape the fly-over bumpkins in their image.