Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

If I had a bulletproof vest, I would have put it on this morning based on many of the 300 plus comments (thus far) in response to yesterday’s BuzzFlash at Truthout commentary: “Many American White Men Worship Guns Because of Sexual Insecurity, Entitlement, and Profit.”

But the intense, paranoid, threatened, gun worship comments only prove the commentary’s point: guns are not merely an “inanimate object” — as the NRA likes to claim – to rabid gun owners; they are a symbol that satisfies intense psychological needs for many white males. [...]

Why… support gun lobby positions that are so bizarrely dangerous and pro-criminal that they appear to come out of a Monty Python skit.  … The examples of such harmful laws from the insane clown gun posse are legion, but here are just three:

 1) The Right to Carry a Concealed Handgun Even if Blind

Take the first paragraph of a 2012 article from the Lawrence Journal-World of Kansas:

A little-known provision in Kansas law that allows the blind and other people with serious physical infirmities to carry concealed weapons in public places likely will not get reviewed by state lawmakers this session. [...]

This support for blind persons carrying concealed weapons in public places is widespread among many of the more rabid gun owners as discussion boards prove. [...]

2) The Right of Terrorists on the US Watch List to Buy Guns

After 9/11, the NRA couldn’t wave the flag with more vigor than Bush and Cheney on uppers.  Yet, the NRA got the then Attorney General John Ashcroft to prohibit the FBI and BATF from stopping the sale of guns to persons on the US terrorist watch list.

As a 2010 ABC News report stated [...]

From Feb. 2004 through Feb. 2010, FBI data shows that individuals on the U.S. terrorist watch list were involved in firearm or explosives background checks 1,225 times, according to the GAO.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., introduced legislation last year to prohibit people on the terror watch list, or who are known to belong to a terrorist organization, from purchasing guns. The bill would authorize the attorney general to deny sale or transfer of firearms to known or suspected terrorists. But it has been struck down by gun rights advocates who said it would breach citizens’ constitutional rights. [...]

As a 2012 Palm Beach Post editorial noted: “People who are on the federal government’s terrorist watch list can’t fly on airplanes. But they can buy guns. Why? Because the National Rifle Association says denying them the right to buy guns is a denial of their Second Amendment rights.”

3) The Right of Alleged Abusers of Women to Own Guns

It has been the standard policy of the NRA and other gun groups to oppose taking away the right of men charged – and in some cases even convicted or under a restraining order — with abusing women to own and possess guns.  There is a long history to this stance, although the NRA uses obfuscation in public statements to make it appear that they are actually on the side of protecting women.  Don’t believe it for a moment. [...]

As David Sirota writes in a March 1 Salon article [...]

What’s amazing – and what evokes Democrats’ “war on women” meme – is the fact that Republicans don’t seem to see that what’s really “ripe for abuse” is guns in the hands of domestic abusers.

If you don’t think the Colorado GOP marching orders on behalf of gun ownership for domestic abusers comes from the NRA, you’ve been on meth too long. [...]

If you can renounce the NRA’s detrimental position on these three issues of public safety and security, then maybe you have a right to say that you don’t worship guns, or that they aren’t a talisman for your manhood.

Otherwise, just admit that happiness is a warm gun.

I edited this one a lot, so please read the whole thing here.

Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

You won’t find anyone willing to dare say it much in the media, but a good percentage of the white men who oppose gun control of any sort – and who back measures that would even allow alleged terrorists and straw purchases for drug dealers to buy guns – are just afraid that without their guns, their phallic power will be reduced to size.  [...]

A gun, particularly assault weapons and lethal militarized handguns, are at least two things: a prosthetic dick and a sign that even unemployed white guys still rule the Western World and sit at the head of the kitchen table. [...]

Let’s face it, the more white guys feel besieged by a multi-cultural society in which women and minorities have chewed away at their perch until it is about to crash to the ground and leave them equals among other humans, the more fierce and maniacal the opposition to regulating guns as dangerous instruments of death subject to serious regulation becomes. [...]

On March 29 in the Washington Post, Charlotte Childress and Harriet Childress discussed the culpability of white male gun worshipers in regards to mass shootings (and that is only the most visible edge of the some 10,000 gun homicides each year in the US, in addition to countless gun injuries):

Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we’d have political debates demanding that African Americans be “held accountable.” Then, if an atrocity such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings took place and African American male leaders held a news conference to offer solutions, their credibility would be questionable. The public would tell these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities.

But when the criminals and leaders are white men, race and gender become the elephant in the room.

As just one of many logical fallacies in the public gun lobby stance in support of guns as religious objects that must be free of all constraints, the Childresses’s point out:

[...]

But women and girls with mental health issues are not picking up semiautomatic weapons and shooting schoolchildren. Immigrants with mental health issues are not committing mass shootings in malls and movie theaters. Latinos with mental health issues are not continually killing groups of strangers.

Of course, black and Latino youth are being shot down in urban areas like ducks on a pond, but the white guy gun lobby could care less about that. [...]

This is not an issue about self-defense; this is about psychological need — born of sexual and cultural displacement — assuaged by the possession of a killing machine.

Please read the rest here.