The inquiry was as predictable as it was genuine after a recent column about owning the organ-mutilating weapon one documentary dubbed “America’s Gun.”
“What I don’t understand is the need for guns like an AR 15 …Do people hunt with these guns? It seems that the animal would be destroyed … I really am interested in knowing the use for these kinds of weapons.”
Another was equally sincere:
“As an anti gun mom, I wonder, what do you do with an AR-15 gun or a similar gun????”
“We both know that no sane person would need or want an AR-15.”
With the country flooded with an estimated 20 million AR-15s or its variants – the AR stands for ArmaLite Rifle, after the company that developed it, not for “assault rifle” – it’s obvious that the last correspondent is badly mistaken.
People are also reading…
What’s the appeal? For one thing, the gun looks “cool” compared to traditional hunting rifles, a few of which have similar barrel lengths and fire the exact same ammunition – a fact not often mentioned. That look, combined with industry marketing, is not to be underestimated in a consumer culture in which style and appearance often outweigh functionality.
But real aficionados who use the gun for everything from target shooting to, yes, hunting, say they like its accuracy, light weight and modular design, allowing owners to build one to taste or to easily customize it with scopes, grips, barrels or other features to their liking. That’s particularly true in states that don’t ban “assault rifles” by limiting their number of cosmetic features.
But I am not an aficionado. In fact, for the first two decades as a gun owner, I never thought of buying such a rifle.
I was perfectly content with my .22-caliber target pistol for league matches and my .38 special personal-protection handgun (which Gov. Kathy Hochul has rendered useless with her near-total ban on concealed carry). With those two weapons, I never thought I’d need anything more.
Then one word changed everything: Charlottesville.
The bone-chilling visuals of neo-Nazis marching with tiki torches brought an epiphany: If the white nationalists want to go crazy, I’d better be ready to go crazy with them.
Granted, that is a perilous choice of words in an age of red flag laws. But it accurately captured what I felt after watching racists and anti-Semites make clear whose country they think this is.
Carrying torches evoking both 1930s Germany and the Ku Klux Klan, the march came less than a year after the 2016 presidential election ripped the scab off of this nation’s original wound. It revealed sore spots we thought – or least hoped – had healed nicely. But instead of healing, those wounds were repeatedly picked at by a president who saw “very fine people, on both sides” at that fatal 2017 Unite the Right spectacle.
It was part and parcel of what would turn out to be a series of incitements – vulgar references to African nations, racist descriptions of Mexican immigrants, calls for far-right extremists to “stand back and stand by,” and finally the Jan. 6 incitements and whatever else is to come as the trial(s) and the 2024 campaign unfold.
Back in 1996, I dismissed as hyperbole the book “The Coming Race War in America” by the late journalist Carl Rowan, who was nobody’s idea of a Black radical. After Charlottesville and everything else that’s occurred, I am not nearly so sanguine. Maybe he wasn’t wrong, just premature.
Suddenly the Boy Scout motto made a whole lot of sense. The America I thought I knew had changed; and should white supremacists ever show up on my doorstop, it was best to be prepared.
When I lived in apartments, I never really expected to experience a fire or a burglary. But I always bought renter’s insurance – just in case.
Owning an AR-style rifle is “white nationalist” insurance – just in case.
Can the nation’s open wound be healed again? Maybe. Perhaps efforts like the April 21-22 conference on hate speech at SUNY Buffalo State can begin to reverse the tide. It is being organized by the family of Ruth Whitfield, one of 10 Black people killed because of their race in last year’s Jefferson Avenue supermarket massacre by a gunman wielding an AR-style rifle.
But putting a scab back on that wound will be a long-term process, at best. That’s especially true when a former president-turned-leading Republican contender, the nation’s top-rated cable news network and a social media that radicalizes people like the Buffalo shooter work assiduously to stoke white resentment, grievance and violence.
Though fully cognizant of the irony, I don’t consider unilateral disarmament a smart option in that racial climate.
Though motivated by opposite philosophies, I wanted an AR-15 for the same reason the Buffalo shooter wanted one: for the damage it can do.
That’s what racism sows in America.
