If These Are the Common People, Then Please Call Me An Elitist

My brother has a pistol that he likes to take to the range. He has the stereotypical "blow shit up" mentality that somehow seems to be connected to his sense of masculinity. On his traditional Christmas Eve visit to the range, he stopped by the gun shop to get some ammo. The shop was out. He went to a second shop. They were out. Finally, he found a third shop that was stocked.

"Ya'll are the third place I been to," he told the cashier. "All the others were sold out."

"Yeah," said the cashier. "We been having a good run of it. People been stocking up on guns and ammo since Obama was elected. Can't keep much on the shelf."

"Heh! Somebody's making a buck offa this," my brother snorted. "You think that maybe the manufacturers are making people all paranoid and shit because they might sell more product?"

The cashier stared at him blankly.

Then my brother told me how our dittohead cousin, who never touched a weapon in his life before last January, now has pistols and rifles and assault weapons stashed in his house. *This cousin lives in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city, one in which a certain former president lives, on a house that he had custom built on two suburban lots. He is married to a very wealthy accountant and hasn't worked for wages in 20 years. Yeah, his world is the very definition of oppressed. So oppressed that he needs an arsenal for protection against the president of the United States.

"You gotta wonder what's going through people's heads," my brother said "They're all thinking zombies are gonna attack or Obama's gonna take their guns or some crazy shit."


"Equally likely scenarios, I'm sure," I said.


"No shit," he said. "No shit."


*ED: I edited this to take out some stuff that, when I saw it on the screen, made me question some of my classist assumptions.