Posted on 05/01/2012 6:06:09 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I was invited via an email from Cabela’s to trick out my AR. It took a minute to figure that they were talking about an automatic rifle. The picture looked like the M-16 I carried 40 years ago in military service, but more upscale. I don't own an AR. I don't even have a gun. It is usually nice shirts and camping equipment I get from them. So it was a little surprising.
I like Cabela’s. When we lived in Michigan I'd take my kids to see their beautiful four-story displays of bears, coyotes, foxes in hinterland settings. It seemed a representative part of glorious northern Michigan known as the UP. I tend to like guns as well. But the AR is not a hunting gun. It is a war weapon and a lot of people are buying them. In fact, guns today are said to be the only bright spot on the economy and Cabela’s stock is booming.
But why are so many Americans buying guns? It has been like this for several years now. Since Obama was elected president. The question should be asked in the same way Thomas Mann once asked, "Why are they disinfecting the streets of Venice?” Is something dark and unknown rising within us? Is it already here?
We enter seasons ahead unlike any we had seen in the passing century. New trends, ideas and people — the Tea Party, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, for beginners — tend to bring shock, even apoplexy to the institutionalized and sanctioned establishment. But the institutionalized norms are rapidly passing. Even the movie “The Hunger Games” brings the predictable scorn and ironic responses on the neurasthenic left and by establishment trend-setters like Vanity Fair and The New York Times. The rising times will not be like the receding times and these new trends mark the rising times. And so does this phenomenon of rapidly rising gun sales.
In the early part of the last century, the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung developed "psychological types" — which Myers-Briggs and other personality tests today are based on — because the German national character was rapidly changing and he wanted to know why and what it meant. The great poets and visionaries, Maude Gunn, Yeats and Mann, sensed it as well and dreamed of blood flowing in rivers. Our institutionalized entertainment, educational and information networks today lacks these canaries in the coal mine. Liberals outnumber conservatives 88 to three in college humanities classrooms and the pillars of public information, the three networks and the two major newspapers are overwhelmingly liberal, yet the population actually breaks about even, liberal and conservative. This is, to say the least, unresponsive; a dream of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World come true which might even be called, to paraphrase Susan Sontag, “totalitarianism with a human face” — a face so accurately caricatured today in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games. So system shock will be greater, with greater difficulty to adapt when new realities arise.
Mann wrote Death in Venice a hundred years ago this year. And our American world this year appears today to be sending signs of subtle and unconscious change — a veiled elephant is entering the room — some of them transfiguring, some of them foreboding. Our world changes. The question is, to what?
The author has never been in the military and has never seen an AR-15.
I’ve never been to Cabela’s but I used to go to Jay’s Sporting goods when I lived up north.
Tell it to the pig parts in my freezer. And my little sister's first deer, some 25 years ago.
/johnny
By that does he mean the century of Adolf Hitler, Musselini, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho-Chi-Min, Edi Amin, and other dictators? Or the millions killed by their governments? That century?
/johnny
We bought a lot of guns when Clinton was president too. And we formed militias. There’s something about a Marxist in the White House that makes us think about opposing tyranny. Its just a part of the American DNA, I guess.
Wolverines!!
The question is a no brainer. Bring it
Yep. I caught that. He's another clueless eater.
/johnny
Dude.
Seriously.
At least check out a Cabela’s. They’re more than just a big-box retail store.
I’m not being a fanboi when I tell you that they’re quite the operation and while you can often find many items cheaper, you can’t find them in many other places all under one roof in such abundance. Don’t drive across country just for going to Cabela’s, but if you’re only a half hour away when you’re on a road trip... I’d make a couple hours to go check it out if you’re at all interested in fishing and hunting.
If you have any interest in fine(r) firearms, check out the larger Cabela’s “gun rooms” which are patterned after a Holland&Holland pattern room of sorts. The one in Kearny, Nebraska is quite impressive, all things considered.
Actually, it's more of a "sports utility rifle" - one that can fill many different roles.
/johnny
Dec 27, 2011
This was a banner year for guns -- 2011 is set to smash the record for gun sales.
The record for a single year was set just last year, when the FBI reported that 14,409,616 background checks were requested. In 2011 that figure will top 16 million. FBI spokesman Steve Fischer said just 1.3% of background checks result in denial of a weapon.
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/2011-smashes-sales-record-guns
Lefties are buying huge numbers of firearms, too. It’s all the rage. TV/movie fantasies, maybe...zombies and all of that? Who knows? One weird part of it all, is that most of the buyers of semi-auto rifles are in the cities. Go figure. You’d think they’d want more shotguns, pistols and the like.
IMO, it has to do with entertainment, style, fantasies of fictitious adventures and all of that. Most of the newbies interested in semi-auto rifles are burning bores up (see silly Youtube videos) without any seriousness toward getting educated in ballistics. Mostly posers.
“Why guns?” you ask.
Because “It is about the redistribution of wealth.”
“Why guns?” you ask.
Because “It is about the redistribution of wealth.”
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