My first recollection about it is that I should not ever touch it. All my life, that gun-a beautiful piece of work, with floral engraving along the stock-lay under my parents’ bed, in plain sight. In his younger days, he took deer throughout the hill country of Texas and Colorado. My father inherited his grandfather’s 16-gauge shotgun, part of a hunting set the man had dispersed among his grandsons once they came of age. 32 for my grandmother after a burglary it was never fired. Toward the end, he purchased a nickel-plated. My maternal grandfather, an Air Force mechanic from Childress, Texas, who enlisted at age 17, had a bolt-action kit gun that he used for hunting rabbits and squirrels, which he fed, once dressed, to his younger siblings he later bought a German Luger picked off a dead Nazi from a friend in the service, and treasured it for many years.

And none of them seemed much enamored with their guns. Roosevelt for how he handled the Dust Bowl and the aftermath of the Great Depression. None of these people were what I would describe as liberal, though I’ve heard, over the years, of pockets of warm feeling toward Franklin D. My great-grandparents-farmers, all-had guns my grandparents had guns my parents have guns. I was born and raised in Texas, as was every generation of my family as far back as we know, except the branch from Louisiana, who were just as well armed as the rest. Even in my own short lifetime it was different. I just remember that it wasn’t always this way. America armed its civilians with so many guns that it conquered itself. Our own politicians are celebrating guns at Christmas mere days after a school shooting precipitated by the purchase of a handgun for the perpetrator as-yes-a Christmas gift. And I tend toward the belief that there are so many guns in circulation and so risibly few politicians demonstrably invested in taking any kind of action on even meek and meager changes to gun policy that there’s not much point in talking about it anymore. I’m not triggered, as it were, by the mere sight of guns. If they were just typical-looking guns with potentially reasonable uses kept in a safe, how would they make liberals cry? Being photographed for the internet is their raison d’être. Their owners don’t intend any confusion on that point. It doesn’t matter if the guns make sense for sport shooting, collecting, hunting, or any other plausible pastime beyond killing people or putting pictures on the internet. Here, the very meaning of guns is to make liberals hysterical liberal hysteria is no longer an obstacle to good policy making or even an irritating by-product of the democratic process, but rather the desired outcome of almost all right-wing political rhetoric. I don’t take Massie or Boebert to be anything other than a troll-at this point, I take very little political rhetoric to be much other than trolling-but their trolling is poignant, not as an intended provocation, but as a marker of the passage of time.īoebert’s and Massie’s photos suggest that we have moved past the point of a kind of firearm respectability politics.

They are what they are, and they’ve done what they were meant to do: bother liberals. Mowing down your enemies with extreme prejudice probably doesn’t feel like a fair approximation of the Christmas spirit, but neither are these photos much related to the season. The Boeberts have your six, (No spare ammo for you, though) /EnDYuXaHDF - Lauren Boebert December 8, 2021

Family photo gun