The NRA: A Deflection

The stars must be aligning. The constellations are achieving greater resolution. And there is a new one to be seen through our telescopes, or better yet sight-scopes mounted on our high-powered rifles. In honor of the National Rifle Association’s annual conference, I felt the need to offer a theory.
The constellation is not the military-industrial complex of the Eisenhower era or the healthcare-insurance-lobby or the real estate-sub-prime mortgage-derivative-credit default swap complex of 2008. No, it is the “Can’t–afford or can’t admit- I-need Viagra-thanks to hormone-injected meat –gun lobby called the NRA.
Here’s how the theory works. Manly men seldom admit to needing a sexual performance enhancing drug to enable their “pistol” to operate effectively, so they deflect their frustration at the government who, they believe, might take away their right to bear arms. Some of them choose to depend on firearms (notice the term and its components: fire-implying heat and arms suggesting appendages) for reliable firepower because their natural firepower appendage no longer works properly. A manly man needs to be able to count on his tools, and when the most precious one fails, he turns his focus to external ones that he can always count on. The most symbolic are those that have the power to destroy (gun) which are the opposite of those that procreate (penis). If he has not lost the biological capacity yet, he is fearful of losing it and therefore stockpiles weapons against the day he actually does find himself “softening.”
One of my favorite sayings is from Oscar Wilde: “All criticism is autobiographical.” When I see the NRA folks hooting and hollering about the 2nd Amendment and how the government is going to take away their guns, I now see this phenomenon as another example of Wilde’s observation. What the gun folks are really mad about is their own loss of sexual virility.
My theory about this epidemic loss which has resulted in one of the most lucrative products in the history of the pharmaceutical industry (Viagra, Cialis, etc.) is the growth hormones pumped into commercially produced meat in the United States. Unless you are buying hormone-free meat products or going Vegan (which manly men never would consider) and you are a man, be prepared to see yourself developing female-like breasts growing on your chest and limpness where you wish there were salutes at attention. These are the same hormones that are causing young girls to mature prematurely. Clearly, what gun owners need to do is eat more of what they shoot, so long as they stay away from aiming at very large cattle and people who eat them.
Therefore, the USDA is tacitly approving the emasculation of the American male which results in his compensatory accumulation of firearms and surrogate firepower. Not only is it embarrassing to admit impotence, it is more expensive to buy Viagra than ammunition. Typically, Viagra pills cost $20 a piece whereas you can get a whole box of live ammunition for that amount of money.
Now some population control fanatics might argue that we need to let well enough alone. We may have to begin shooting people just to keep the lid on exponential population expansion, not that we don’t do that already in the name of promoting peace and prosperity around the world. If the USDA starts banning the use of growth hormones in meat, we might have to actually start taking the idea of birth control seriously. But I digress. This was about trying to explain why the NRA folks are so angry.
Now you might say, well, what about the women of the NRA. The Viagra-impotence argument doesn’t hold any water with them. All right, you asked for it. The answer, of course, is penis envy. There is no better symbol of penis envy on the part of women than a picture of a woman holding a gun. Some women wish they had that natural appendage and the privileges of power that go with it, strange as it may seem. They want to be just like men. Their sense of impotence, however, derives from their traditional historical status as second class citizens; and, like those who suffer from any sort of inferiority complex or actual inferior status, they want to compensate for it somehow, and nothing symbolizes power more than a gun, except, of course, that natural and fully functioning appendage attached to a man.
Therefore, that new constellation we can witness if we look long enough through our scopes is the one I mentioned in the first paragraph, which I won’t introduce again here except to say that the NRA could stand for No Reproductive Activity or Never Really Adjusted or No Reasoning Ability or Never Read Anything or Not Rational Americans….