The Trump-Loving Alt Right Turns to Guns to Provoke and Offend

[billh58]

Emerging from the Internet's shadows amid the roiling Republican nomination race, a movement embraces firearms for their power to upset.

The punditry’s dissection of the origins of the Donald Trump juggernaut has lately been joined by exhaustive analysis of a corollary phenomenon: the rise of the self-described “alt right.” The alt right is a confrontational strain of conservative thought that has recently crept out of the shadowy online precincts where it was born to assert its influence on the 2016 campaign. Right-wing news website Breitbart recently added the latest entry to the burgeoning genre with an essay titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” The article ran more than 5,000 words and was co-authored by the loosely affiliated movement’s most prominent figurehead, a British writer named Milo Yiannopoulos.

For those looking to understand the alt-right phenomenon, an examination of Yiannopoulos and his online persona is a good place to start. He presents a stark alternative to the staid Heritage Foundation set. Openly gay, sporting a shock of blond hair and boasting nearly 200,000 Twitter followers, Yiannopoulos has sworn allegiance to Trump, whom he calls “Daddy.” He has also taken to posing with semi-automatic weapons. Recently, he circulated a photo of himself holding an AK-47 and a Louis Vuitton handbag, while wearing a suit and a camouflage “Make America Great Again” hat.

If the alt right has a coherent credo, it’s to wage war on what it sees as politically correct speech and thought. The movement’s members seem to latch onto certain ideas and images due to the outrage they cause across the political spectrum. This explains how Trump, who embraced the politics of divisiveness long before the Internet even existed, has become an alt-right folk hero. It also accounts for the alt right’s embrace of guns and gun imagery.

Yiannopoulos seems to relish the iconography of firearms for the reasons that drive much of his public life: They are fraught symbols with the power to piss off other people. The alt right’s adherents don’t often invoke the “first freedom” talking point, the heritage of sportsmen, or the need for self-defense — the rhetoric used by groups like the National Rifle Association. For Yiannopoulos and much of the rest of the alt right, guns are a locus of symbolic conflict, yet another means of provocation.

https://www.thetrace.org/2016/04/trump-alt-right-guns-milo-yiannopoulos/

This bears repeating: "Yiannopoulos seems to relish the iconography of firearms for the reasons that drive much of his public life: They are fraught symbols with the power to piss off other people."

This appears to be the goal of most of the "cold dead hands" right-wing gun lobby screamers: to piss off other people by waving their guns around in public and trying to look tough. In reality, they are craven cowards, racists, bigots, and antisocial misfits. They are the epitome of the need for sensible gun control in this country.

These are the armed assholes who voted for Trump and are spouting hatred in our communities around the country.

[Hoyt]

1. Gunz for white wingers has always been more about intimidation than

that self-defense junk.

[billh58]

2. Of course it has

along with the myth of a "responsible" gun owner who belongs to a militia.

[pangaia]

5. Perhaps also because their junk is junk.

[guillaumeb]

3. On another note,

Milo is calling Trump "Daddy", and he is also appropriating (and possibly hijacking) the hyper macho language of some gun owners by his flamboyant persona. On another level, is he mocking the NRA and its many right wing disciples by this flamboyance and appropriation?

[billh58]

4. He doesn't really

seem to fit the NRA mold for a rough and tumble "manly man" does he? I can only hope that his displays thoroughly piss off the right-wing gun culture.

[guillaumeb]

6. And one would think that much of that gun culture is shaped

by the gun industry, in concert with the NRA, to mold that opinion.

Witness also the attempts to widen the market with the smaller weapons supposedly designed for a woman's (or adolescent's) hand.

Plus the steady propaganda efforts to normalize gun ownership and link it to the mythical pioneer days when, as NRA fantasy would have it, every white person walking upright was carrying a weapon.

(A bit off topic, but related to the gun culture theme.)

[billh58]

7. Using the Second Amendment

and "freedom" as a marketing guise coupled with fear of "confiscation" has been the hallmark of the right-wing gun lobby's sales efforts for decades. Their current base of old white men is dying out, so they're doubling their marketing efforts to non-traditional gun buyers -- women and younger males.

Each year fewer homes report having guns. (http://www.newsweek.com/us-gun-ownership-declines-312822) and only 22% of Democrats report a gun in the home as opposed to 49% of Republicans. (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/the-demographics-and-politics-of-gun-owning-households/)

Overall, common sense and reason are winning but we still have much left to do.

[DashOneBravo]

8. I've never understood them

And I've met them on gun ranges.

Most are wannabees just dressing up. They get a a lot of rolled eyes when they are around shooters. And they get a lot of comments from veterans. If they want to walk around carrying a weapon, then join the Infantry.

They are losers and hurt responsible gun owners.

[billh58]

9. I believe that most of

them couldn't qualify to join the real military...

[DashOneBravo]

10. I agree completely

Those dudes don't represent most gun owners. There are a lot of us who don't agree with the current NRA management. Solid gun owning Democrats with a ton of range time and yet support common sense rules