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Malcolm Gladwell and Wendy Kaminer

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from: Wendy Kaminer

re: Schools, Guns and Charlton Heston

Posted Tuesday, June 9, 1998, at 7:01 PM ET

I don't mind Heston taking shots at hypocritical Hollywood liberals, but I admit to being a little peeved by the attempt to make unregulated gun ownership a feminist issue. The NRA has even appropriated rhetoric about choice: "How to choose to refuse to be a victim," its ads declared a few years ago. Not that I believe women are naturally pacific and wouldn't take to killing; some would, and do. Not that I can't understand the appeal of a gun as an equalizer for women who fear being attacked by men. Still, we're all headed for trouble when we imagine that our autonomy is so fragile that it can only be protected at gunpoint. Wait, I take that back: We're not headed for trouble. Lot's of people are already there.

Identifying yourself with a victim group often works. The marketing of gun owners as besieged individualists has helped rally them - even though they're in the anomalous position of being a besieged majority; I think over half of America's households own guns - ( you could look it up.) It is a little disconcerting, I agree, to hear gun ownership advocates trumpeting their oppression, but for all the critiques of victimism we've heard for at least the past five years, (especially from the right), few groups are above pleading their own victimization. Even religious people get away with presenting themselves as besieged - in a country where practically everyone professes to believe in God and millions of people watch TV shows about angels.

Don't you love hypocrisy? You have to find it amusing or you'd be constantly outraged, and that makes you self-righteous, which isn't any fun. There's evidence of hypocrisy in the paper practically every day. One day, right wing Congressmen are righteously defending the First Amendment, in order to oppose campaign finance reform. The next day they're denouncing pornography on the Internet and demanding its prohibition. (How many defenders of their First Amendment rights to extort campaign contributions voted for the Communications Decency Act anyway?) Or, consider the supposedly libertarian cybermoguls cheering on the government's lawsuit against Microsoft. (Did you see the Wall Street Journal story on them today?) I admit that my own understanding of the Microsoft suit is only a couple of notches above my understanding of neutrinos. But you don't have to have a sophisticated understanding of technology to know why conservative Orrin Hatch is supporting the lawsuit; you only need to know that a Microsoft competitor resides in his state. In some ways, the world isn't really all that messy after all; people's motives, at least, are often pretty simple.

See you tomorrow.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Wendy Kaminer

re: Schools, Guns and Charlton Heston

Posted Tuesday, June 9, 1998, at 7:01 PM ET
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Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Wendy Kaminer is a fellow at Radcliffe College.
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