Responsible gun owners, this is why you are losing the public.
The guy had a note in his pocket expressing his intent to exercise his rights. Why a note in his pocket? Why would you bother with a note when you could just say something? Because he expected to get shot.
There is no reason any law-abiding person needs an assault rifle in the grocery store. None. Maybe in Switzerland, where guys are popping by for milk as they walk home from militia assembly, but I rather doubt that the kind of person with an assault rifle is taking public transit to Kroger. So why isn’t the rifle locked up in (one presumes) the pickup truck? I grew up in Ala-fucking-bama, my family drove around with guns all the time, and not once, not on one single solitary occasion in the first twenty-five years of my live, did we ever find it necessary to go strapped into the goddamned Piggly Wiggly. Al-Qaeda is not lurking in the produce cooler, and the odds are effectively 100% that a firefight is not breaking out in the frozen foods.
Take it, Susan Faludi. From Wikipedia’s entry re: her 1999 book “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man”:
“The common theme that runs through the book is that men have attempted to live up to the expectations of masculinity established in post-World War II America, only to find society not living up to its end of the bargain as globalization, downsizing and other economic pressures have made it difficult for men to live up to their expected roles as providers. At the same time she applies a feminist critique to these expectations, while noting that the feminist critique of the rise of an ornamental culture applies to men as much as women: As the culture has shifted toward an ornamental one in which awards, popular culture symbols of ideal masculinity, and economic bottom lines have become the societal norms of success, ordinary men are losing self-esteem and a sense of purpose. In particular she links the problems of many men today with abusive or absent fathers when growing up, and is critical of the rise of a corporate “organization man” culture in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to absent fathers failing to provide a positive, nurturing environment to their children, and then to failed expectations as companies laid off longtime loyal employees during the 1980s and 1990s.”
There’s a very legitimate case that the modern world is at odds with our traditional ideas of what manhood means. We are no longer a rural pioneer society, where one has to go hunt for dinner and protect the family home against predatory beasts or marauding humans. We no longer have the postwar social contract, where you can graduate high school and get on with an employer that will pay you a living wage that can support your wife the homemaker and your children plus offer a sufficient pension in retirement. Never mind college; I know plenty of law school graduates who are looking for work in other fields so they can find a job, any job. Somebody in an exurban service economy, somebody whose job can be sent off to China or India, somebody whose job can be done off the books for single digits an hour by a desperate undocumented migrant worker? Those poor bastards are living on the edge of a knife, and it stands to reason that Ed Earl Brown feels powerless to control his own destiny more often than not.
But.
In the immortal words of Chris Rock: “if you got a gun, you don’t need to work out.” I can strap on my M4gery and swagger through the cereal aisle and everybody will cower before my might, because there’s no law that says I can’t do it so NYAH NYAH LOOK AT ME I’M NOT TOUCHING YOU. And looking at the demographic patterns of gun ownership – as more and more firearms accumulate with the same people, who as a cohort are ever older and white-male-er – it’s hard not to see a fundamental connection. Not to put too fine a point on it – the problems of guns, and the people who want to need the guns, can in large part be reduced to the question “How shall we then man up?”
In so many ways, it goes back to W.J. Cash, as it always does, and his characterization of the essential Southern quality: “that no man living could cross him and get away with it.” I don’t have to go along to get along. I don’t have to listen to some pointy-headed bureaucrat. I don’t have to stand behind the yellow line. I’ll just roll through that stop sign. I’ll put my cigarette out when I feel like it.
It’s not just Southern anymore. It’s not even just gun-suckers anymore. Call it fascism, call it socialism, call it political correctness, or just call it fucking manners if you like. But until our concept of citizenship in a polite society rises above the level of a sugar-shocked 8 year old in the back seat on a road trip, don’t expect a lot of progress on things like assholes meandering their guns through the grocery.