The articles in the StarTribune usually drive me crazy and this article on Page E12 of the Variety Section was no exception. Reporter Rachel Hutton wrote an article titled "Taking Aim At Gun Culture--A Minneapolis firearm instructor shoots down myths about weapons and power--and his own toxic masculinity."
She interviews burly gun instructor Mick Sharpe. She writes: "But on a Sunday morning, above a south Minneapolis storefront, Sharpe is preaching. Under a Black Lives Matter and rainbow pride flag, the 47-year-old firearms instructor unleashes aphorisms by the round:
'Your goal is not to win a fight. It is to realize a fight might happen and not be there when it does.'
'We don't shoot to kill. We shoot to live.'
My response: one of the Dorr brothers from MGR, my heroes, would not have a Black Lives Matter or rainbow coalition flag in their office. Sharpe is a legitimate gun instructor, but his politics are decidedly not conservative. He is a Leftie all the way through.
His aphorisms strike me as wise and true. Guns are for self-defense and one is to avoid trouble if at all possible.
Hutton continues: "'Gun culture sucks' is not among the things you would expect to hear at a carry permit class. But Sharpe defies expectations--as do many of today's new gun owners."
My response: Neither MGR, the NRA or other gun rights groups have any issue with women, people of color or other groups owning or carrying guns. We all believe and support the rights of any law-abiding American to enjoy and exercise her 2A rights.
As for Sharpe's remark that gun culture sucks, he is entitled to his opinion, even though he is totally wrong. Our gun culture does not suck, but it a glorious tradition. Never has a civilian population been so well-armed to enjoy their naturally rights and constitutional rights to keep and bear arms. It is a magnificent tradition that has kept big government in this country from turning tyrannical--up to now.
Hutton continues: "About 400,000 Minnesota civilians now hold a valid carry permit, triple the number from a decade ago. Roughly 40% of Americans lives in a home with a gun."
My response: These figures seem accurate and are great news. All civilians that are law
abiding should be armed.
Deeper in the article, Hutton continues: "Though Sharpe now embodies a tough guy aesthetic, he rails against an industry that markets Ar-15-style rifles as a prereq for one 'man card' and what he describes as the 'angry murder fantasy crap' that some firearms enthusiasts espouse, His efforts to take the tox masculinity out of gun culture are, in a sense, personal--a way to atone for his past as a self-described 'toxic man.'
'Guns can be considered a useful tool, but they can also be a tool of mayhem and destruction,' Sharpe said. 'And guys like me created the culture that allowed that to happen. So guys like me have to be the ones to fix it.'"
My response: I will not deny that there are people that regard gun ownership as proof of their masculinity, but most guns owners I know like and want guns for sporting, target shoot, hunting, self-defense against tyrannical government, criminals, mobs, and crazies shooting up people in restaurants and churches.
These gun owners have usually been conservative, rural white males but the new people getting into gun ownership are diverse and that is laudable. Males are not toxic, and the gun culture is not toxic. These are just stereotypical tropes and generalizations, intentionally hurled at white males, conservatives and gun owners by the toxic Left. There is no merit in these demonizing stereotypes about white male gun owners, and we reject wholeheartedly any and every attempt by the haters of guns, conservatives, whites, males, and rural people to define who and what we are and think.
Guns, in the hands of sane and law-abiding, decent, moral American civilians make us peaceful, civilized and law abiders.
Guns are a tool and a useful tool that can be deadly if wielded by gang members, criminals, the insane or federal police out to enslave disarmed masses. These minority gun owners, many illegally doing so, are the toxic gun culture. The high murder rate and high crime rate today is not caused by conservative white males and everyone no it.
We need 90% of American households to have guns, and we need to teach ethics so people know how and when to use a gun or not. Technical skill in weapons training is a plus too.
Sharpe warns those attending his carry permit class to use less lethal weapons whenever possible, to retreat and deescalate whenever one can. Hutton seems to think this is part of Sharpe's effort to make gun culture less aggressive, toxic,and confrontational, but the two firearms instructors that I have had talked the same as Sharpe's did and most of the class students were white males. Hutton seems to characterize the "toxic male' gun culture as one that is shoot first and ask questions later, but it does not exist. Almost no one I know thinks remotely like that. I am deep into the gun culture, and I see skilled ethical, patriotic gun-wielders everywhere. She needs to spend a weekend with my family and me at the gun ranger at Walker.
Handling a gun--let alone discharging a firearm to wound or kill someone--is an action that can lead to arrest, even jail time.
The more one knows about guns and the law, the more careful and hesitant one becomes to use one. Most males know this The USCCA is training thousands of gun owners on knowing their rights and legal obligations while carrying a firearm. I carry a million-dollar liability policy on myself in case something goes wrong. A liberal county DA in Minnesota would love to throw the book at me if I got in gun trouble.
Hutton continues: "Sharpe would like to see carry permit-seekers receive 16 hours of classroom and range training, funded by a tax on firearm purchases, and perhaps submit to a psychiatric evaluation boy a provider of their choosing. He finds Minnesota's current requirements too lax, 'like throwing the keys to a Ferrari to a 16-year-old kid."
My response: We gun rights advocates will allow no additional extensions of classroom mandated training, no taxes on firearms, and no psychiatric evaluations mandated for all gun buyers. We have learned over the last 70 years that Leftists hate liberty, constitutional rights, gun rights and the free exercise of these rights by the private citizens. Government is inherently evil and big government is a monster. We dare not allow government to control every aspect of our lives, let alone the gun right. Leftists are fanatics, and have but one aim: to confiscate, register gun owners, and then take away all guns from private citizens. They lie all the time. They promise that their incrementally increased throttling of and regulation of the citizens’ 2A rights is not ominous or about confiscation but is only common sense, and reasonable. There will be no compromising with these totalistic gun confiscationists disguising their Marxist, totalitarian agenda as Fabian incrementalism.
Sharpe is too apologetic and too confessional, and Hutton seems to demand that he be that way to meet her preconception of white men as toxic, violent brutes and thugs that pick on women, children, the environment, and minorities. He seems not to grasp that he is being used by her. I reject all of this discriminatory Leftist stereotyping of white males as false and slanderous.
One final quote from her: "Sharpe, in some ways, straddles both cultures. He looks like he might belong to the tough-guy, guns-make-me-powerful cohort he initially joined and he clearly understands that mentality--because he once had it."
My response: most men I know do regard owning guns and something manly and empowering, but it is not a theatrical guns-make-me-a-tough-powerful-guys as it is guns are a tool of preserving one's safety and liberty in a violent world. Competence, skill, morality, patriotism, home-defense and moral self-restraints are what gun owners manifest, not the weird, insecure strutting, cowboy image that Hutton envisions and is a figment of her suspicious, erroneous imagination.
Sharpe may look like a tough guy, but his gun culture is not my gun culture, and his gun culture will lead to the government having all the guns, and Americans have no guns. None of these officials can be trusted even a little bit.
Jordan Peterson, if I may paraphrase him, defines a good man is someone that is dangerous (or conceivably so) but virtuous. He needs to be gentle with women, children, and pets, while retaining his warrior side enough to fight to defend his family and country should the need arise.
This good man, the average gun owner, refuses to be abused by anyone, by evil sadists of any kind. He is virtuous and self-controlled; he is powerful, armed, but self-restraining and civilized. He will not hurt others, and this is virtuous masculinity, typical of male gun owners, that people like Hutton need to acknowledge as white males as they actually are, not some incel/red-pilled villains haunting the nightmare imaginings of Lefties.
We should dig into the psyche of Hutton and all of the various rainbow groups that she alludes to in her article. Let us dig into their imperfections, their frailties, their toxicity. If a Lefty is for Big Government and big government regulating firearms, that view is evil, because people are born evil, and those fortunate enough to be part of the elite running any society, will be corrupted and turn abusive and oppressive of the masses their rule. Centralized power always corrupts those wielding it. Leftists eagerly work to bring about a totalitarian regime in America that enslaves all reduced to serfdom in stifling hierarchies.
Leftists tell and live many lies, including that Big Government is a benevolent force and that the elite and Party running the totalitarian state are implicitly trustworthy, and will do what is best for the masses they rule. This vicious Big Lie is one the Marxists truly believe.
Gun onwers, especially white male, rural, conservative ones, admire political freedom, gun rights and they favor constitutional republicanism and constitutional guarantees that they can keep and bear arms as private individual citizens.
These individual citizens are alert and principled, and will not stomach being suppressed and oppressed by Big Government, Big Business, Big Church, Big Military, Big Universities to rule over them and confiscate their guns, their liberty and their rights. In unique America the people are well-armed and proud, out to defend America and our fine way of life. That is the gun culture that Hutton needs to recognize whether she accepts it or not.
I refute her version of what gun culture should look like. It is obvious that the Left and Right are polarized and divided as bad or worse than before the civil war. But we are opposed to their version of gun culture and American culture in general, but our war is verbal and nonviolent. I am convinced that Leftists taking aim at our gun culture and our overall culture mean to take us out. Whites, males, Christians, conservatives, veterans, patriots, and gun lovers are to be reduced to bondage, slavery and reversely discriminated against as the new undesirables in a new caste system. It will not be a classless society, and those in the bottom caste could very well end up in newly constructed gulags here, or even sent to extermination camps. Our enemies hate us totally, and their active capacity to kill, maim, destroy and overthrow is without any bottom for how radical they can and will act. These are real scary people.
They aim to take us out, but we do not and will not work to take them out. We will loudly, proudly, willfully organize to defeat them at the ballot box, and to get them out of power and keep them out of power at every level of government across the land. If they are not violent, terroristic, or rioting, they are to be left strictly alone to swim in their own fantasies. We must not let them or their allies at the pulpit, in Academia, in legacy media, in Big Tech or Hollywood brainwash us any longer with their dark, twisted narrative about America.
Sharpe may look like a macho tough white male, but he is regarded at an ex-toxic white male that at least repented but is still being held to account for his past toxic sins. Other white males have not even admitted to their oppression, violence, and toxicity so they are beyond redemption.
White males are not perfect, and none of God's children are, but white males, gun-owners are not, for the most part, are seemly, logical, lawful, peaceful, civilized, and responsible so they should continue as Americans to enjoy their 2A rights to have and bear arms as individual citizens without government interference or direction.
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