After posting two entries about Amanda’s columns in Salon last week, I had hoped to not write about her for a while, but reader The Rogue Elf brought another column of hers to my attention in our comment section on Monday. I shouldn’t have read it, but I did. Now I have a twisted compulsion to address this one, too.
In her piece, Amanda pointed to a Washington Post article that used the following graphic that showed a spike in Google searches for the term “concealed carry” following the shootings in Colorado Springs and San Bernardino:
About this search trend, Amanda wrote:
The likely explanation for [the recent upturn in “concealed carry” searches on Google] is that many Americans, likely of the more conservative bent, buy into the argument that a “good guy with a gun” can somehow stop a mass shooting from happening…
[…Bunch of words where Amanda tells her readers that the spike is because gun owners see themselves as crimestopping action hero wannabes. Amanda should be pleased by the rise in people looking into the process to arm themselves through legal means. They want to be trained how to use their weapons and acquire permits for them. Instead, she frets that people don’t get trained well enough during the concealed carry process. Her basis for this was a segment she watched on The Daily Show, proving to her how inept typical American civilians would be in an active shooter situation. Because comedic lefty actors are your typical gun-owning Americans…]
The Google data demonstrates, from multiple angles, how much this debate is really being shaped by people’s fantasies, bigotries, and emotion rather than reason. [More words in which Amanda makes additional generalized assumptions about conservatives and gun owners.] The Google Trends chart suggests that the interest in concealed carry post-San Bernardino has very little relationship to the risk of facing down an Islamic terrorist.
There’s very little relationship between interest in concealed carry and the risk of terrorism, eh? Tell that to those who suddenly decided to become interested in concealed carry after the post-San Bernardino act of terror, per this Google Trends chart:
It may appear that this confirms Amanda’s idea that paranoid right-wingers go on a gun-buying spree after an act of terrorism takes place so they may someday be known as the Greatest American Hero. But something else is happening that makes people want to look into buying a gun and getting the permits for them. See what happens when another element is added to the list:
Notice any…little relationship?
Contrary to Amanda’s theory, the interest in concealed carry isn’t merely about being able to protect oneself and others when a threat arises. It also has a lot to do with the push by Amanda, Barack, and the rest who want to wrest control away from the law-abiding American citizens’ constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms. The people are becoming wise to the fact that with each press conference about gun control and written column about bitter clingers, it’s another effort to disarm them. The previously highest spike in interest in concealed carry correlated to the post-Sandy Hook push for more control over guns at the end of 2012, which Amanda mentioned at the beginning of her column:
When the government and its sycophants want to take away the people’s ability to protect themselves, the people will resist. Amanda blocks that part of American history from her mind, replacing it with muskets and slaveowners. She thinks it’s crazy for ordinary people to be armed because they’re all a bunch of irresponsible conservatives living out their superhero fantasies:
Clearly, this entire rush to buy guns for concealed carry has very little to do with actual risks of violence at the hands of Islamic terrorists. It’s about a fantasy, one that has very little to do with real world fears and everything to do with identity. Buying a gun to fight the terrorists is a bit of play-acting by conservatives, a bit of role-playing that they can indulge with confidence that they’ll never actually be tested to see if they have the terrorism-fighting superhero inside that they claim to have.
Again with the identity ridiculousness, like last week. If you believe what this woman writes, you would think that only conservatives own guns. You would, of course, be wrong to take her word for it. A study by Pew last year–Pew being one of Amanda’s go-to statistical resources–found that 22 percent of Democrats have a gun in their homes while 49 percent of Republicans do, and more than a third of independent voters have a gun in their households. Heck, 23 percent of those who self-identified as liberal said they have access to a gun in their houses. So conservatives are not the only type of people who own guns.
And as I wrote over the weekend, the proportion of people who have used firearms to commit murder is incredibly small compared to the total amount of people who own a gun. However, the big picture means nothing to those who want the government to fundamentally transform and control the lives of its people.
Amanda seemed quite alarmed by this sudden surge of interest in concealed carry. But how much of a concern is the subject to most Americans, really? Not as much as Planned Parenthood is, for instance:
“Concealed carry” doesn’t rank in the top 250 topics currently trending on Google. In fact, the word “gun” shows up nowhere on the list, although Google currently has a feature called “Guns in America” on their Trends page right now.
If you want to get a good idea of how interested most googlers are in indulging “the gun industry that profits off selling cowboy fantasies,” look no further than this:
In a way, it’s a good sign that Americans feel secure enough to not think too much about having to take up arms to defend ourselves. In another way, it’s disheartening to know so many are distracted by cultural rot that they don’t realize or care that there are people of influence who are trying to take away their rights.
So while Amanda flips out that a growing number of people are looking at how to rightfully bear arms in accordance with the law, most of the country continues to not give a damn. It’s still a lot more interested in the superficial.
And I’m going to try harder to not give a damn about Amanda, at least for a while. A man can only take so much duh.
