It's Not The N.R.A. Money, It's The Pin-Dicked Gun-Humping Voters

If we can't buy our way out of this, we'll have to shoot our way out.

Identity, not money, drives gun worship

The small size of the NRA’s donations makes it unlikely they’re meaningfully bribing politicians. Nor do GOP politicians behave as if they’ve been bribed. When politicians vote their donors over their constituents, they don’t tend to boast about it.

Former Georgia GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler never held a press conference to proudly announce to voters that she’d made millions on stock trades that sure looked like they were related to inside, early knowledge of the Covid pandemic. Independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has been fairly open about her cozy relationship with private equity, and has raked in cash from that sector with aplomb. But she also avoids public events in which constituents can question her, and her approval in her home state is dismal.

GOP politicians don’t treat guns like dirty stock trades, and don’t try to hide from constituents after gun votes. On the contrary, they tout their pro-gun credentials every chance they get. Rep. Andy Ogles, who represents the district where the Nashville shooting took place, sent out a Christmas card showing himself with his wife and children standing in front of a tree. They’re all grinning and holding assault weapons.

Especially in light of the horrific recent shooting, the card is ghoulish. But Ogles doesn’t see it as ghoulish, and he didn’t make it for donors. He took the image, and sent it out, because he believes his constituents will see it and identify with him. The way you show you’re a real, red-blooded, Christofascist Republican is to take pictures of yourself with a bunch of guns.

As communications professor Ryan Neville-Shepard explains at the Milwaukee Independent, guns on the right have increasingly become a symbol of white masculinity — and I’d argue of white Christian masculinity. Guns stand for defending home and family against “criminals” — a term which, in the dogwhistle rich environment of the right, means “non-white people.” In addition, Neville-Shepard notes, guns in right-wing political ads during the Obama administration became a symbol of (violent) opposition to Democratic government. Marjorie Taylor Greene ran an ad touting a gun giveaway in 2021 in which she promised to “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda.”

Noah Berlatsky and Aaron Rupar at Public Notice. Worth reading it all.