There’s that phrase again, and now I’m defending it…

If I do it ironically, does that make me a hipster?

Okay, I’m on record as disliking the term “gun culture.” I’m a member of it if anybody is, I just think it’s a dumb descriptor. But if that’s the label, that’s the label and nobody outside gets to piss on it.

Especially when it’s an avowed enemy.

No one said this fight would be easy and I fully understand that changing the current gun culture across the nation will not take place overnight.

I’d swear I’ve seen this quote coming from two different women’s mouths in the past couple of days: I went looking for a video clip distinctly remembering a smug-looking blond woman. Instead I get a victim-of-the-week “spokesperson.”

Whatever. It has been repeated too often for you to need to hear it from me: You can always tell when these people are lying. They don’t want to “change” the gun culture, except in that abolishment is a sort of change.

Well, I don’t want to be abolished. The rhetoric changes slightly from week to week, but it never goes away and I’m getting sick of it. (Heh. I’m a frickin’ hermit in the desert, and everybody I know is armed to the teeth. All I ever see of the culture war comes from the screen of this little computer. I can really only imagine what you guys are going through.) They keep banging on with the lies – “We don’t want to take your guns, we only want (universal background checks, or restrictions on the ‘mentally ill,’ or ‘smart guns,’ or guns that don’t look scary, or guns that don’t hold any ammo, or … du jour)” – but in their rare unguarded moments they make it clear they want more than to take our guns. They detect in us an alien culture, and it frightens them, and they want it dead.

In my darker moments I think maybe they’re right. Maybe the divide between us has grown so great that we’re not arguing over issues anymore, we’re two inimical cultures locked in proximity and preparing for war.

Funny, I always thought it was just me. I used to be angry and paranoid and convinced that my life would end in blood. Even so when I went through my militia period I didn’t take it very seriously. Most of the people I met were whackos of one stripe or another and I never wanted to stand very close to them for very long. Lately I’ve sneered at the Threepers with their citadels and their broken windows.

In my darker moments I suspect they’re going to turn out to get the last laugh. Such things never end well. It makes me wonder what sort of world my granddaughter will inherit.