Not taught in civics class

I think I've finally figured something out about anti-gun control folks. This came to me yesterday when I got a little miffed at a newspaper article about a bill being held up anonymously by a senator. First of all, I had no idea they could do this--and I think this is why I was angered by the article, more so than the stopping of the bill. If someone in congress is going to be rabidly pro-gun, don't we have a right to know who it is? We get to know how much money our politicians get, don't we at least get to know what they do to bills?

Anyway, I got to thinking about who in their right mind wouldn't want to ban plastic handguns. They seem pretty obviously designed to evade metal detectors, right? They're certainly not for hunting or personal protection, so those classic arguments go out the window. The slippery slope / civil libertarian argument might apply, but wouldn't you want to take a public stance on that one?

Nope--it's fetishists. And I know there's all sort of Freudian gun-as-penis and masculine power stuff that can go here, but keep in mind that a fetish isn't necessarily sexual--though in this case I'm perfectly willing to listen to arguments. The only explanation I can come up with for gun nuts is that they have a gun fetish. And that is the only reason I can imagine that a senator wants to remain anonymous is that fetishes and shame come as a package deal--Even if Dan Savage says that people shouldn't be ashamed of their urges to be pooped on, isn't that's part of the fun of licking feet and getting tied up, feeling a little guilty about it?

Or maybe it's a little dirty. That's how I finally thought of this. When I was small, and we would go to someone's house and my grandmother would put her purse on top of the refrigerator so that the kids wouldn't get at it, it was a gun safety issue--she was either on her way to or from work, and she had her service revolver in there. As I've grown up, I never thought of it as anything other than safety. I certainly don't remember ever, ever going through her purse.

But thinking about the gun thing yesterday, I remembered that the notion at the time wasn't that it was dangerous, it was just a little dirty. The emotion that I remember is a little bit of shame--the same emotion that would have been hanging in the air if she was packing a dildo (which I can't imagine) or a spare colostomy bag (which I can--as my grandfather had one near the end of his life). Everyone knew what was in there, but we generally didn't ever talk about it. And if we did, there was this tinge of shame in the air.

So it is with the gun nuts. They just don't talk about it. Once in a while, someone will talk about hunting, or it will come up in conversation ('Do anything last weekend?' 'Not much. Had lunch in Town X.' 'What were you doing there?' 'Oh, I was out at the range, shootin my gun.') Those conversations turn out to feel very close to 'Got a new piercing' and 'Got laid--but I'm not gonna date her/him.' Tinged with guilt, but feelin' good.