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Hippity-Hoplophobia
by Rex May
[email protected]

Special to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

I never let a day go by without checking to see what Vox Day is up to. He's one of my favorite bloggers, and I seldom disagree with him about anything of substance, although he might disagree with me about what constitutes being "of substance." He's religious (Christian) and I'm not, and I'm a Darwinist, and he's a skeptic on the subject, but interestingly, we come very frequently to the same conclusions about social and political matters. Now, the female of the human species is more fearful and more risk-averse than the male, a fact that I find to be perfectly predictable for Darwinistic reasons. I'm sure Vox Day agrees about the fact, and I wonder what he thinks the cause is? But, no matter. The difference in fearfulness between the sexes isn't terribly extreme in any case. And, as you can see above, it's perfectly understandable that these girls would fear, and flee from, a giant black rabbit from the Moon. Who wouldn't? This is an example of hippity-hoplophobia rather than hoplophobia, which is what this post is actually about. Now, Vox Day is accustomed to dealing with frightened rabbits instead of frightening rabbits, and you'll just have to read his blog to see what I mean by that. But it's interesting how the whole thing relates—rabbits, Vox Day, frightened girls, frightened/frightening rabbits, hoplophobia—to a post in today's Vox Day blog, which I just can't resist reprinting in full here. The original is HERE, and when you go, tell them Ex-Army sent you:

The raw terror of the gun

A woman nearly scares herself to death by wearing an gun on her hip... an empty gun:

I started my 30-day gun trial with a little window-shopping. I visited a gun show and two gun dealers. I ended up buying a Glock 9mm handgun from Tony, a gun dealer four miles from my house. I settled on this model because it was a smallish gun and because Tony recommended it for my stated purposes of protecting myself and my home.

It was obvious from the way I handled the gun that I knew nothing about firearms. Tony sold it to me anyway. The whole thing took 7 minutes. As a gratified consumer, I thought, "Well, that was easy." Then the terrifying reality hit me, "Holy hell, that was EASY." Too easy. I still knew nothing about firearms.

Tony told me a Glock doesn't have an external safety feature, so when I got home and opened the box and saw the magazine in the gun I freaked. I was too scared to try and eject it as thoughts flooded my mind of me accidentally shooting the gun and a bullet hitting my son in the house or rupturing the gas tank of my car, followed by an earth-shaking explosion. This was the first time my hands shook from the adrenaline surge and the first time I questioned the wisdom of this 30-day experiment.

I needed help. I drove to where a police officer had pulled over another driver. Now, writing this, I realize that rolling up on an on-duty cop with a handgun in tow might not have been fully thought through....

I told him I just bought a gun, had no clue how to use it. I asked him to make sure there were no bullets in the magazine or chamber. He took the magazine out and cleared the chamber. He assured me it was empty and showed me how to look. Then he told me how great the gun was and how he had one just like it.

The cop thought I was an idiot and suggested I take a class. But up to that point I'd done nothing wrong, nothing illegal.

So here I sit at Starbucks, and the irony couldn't be thicker. On March 12, 2010, I was surrounded by big hairy men with guns on their hips, yelling at me as I led a protest against Starbuck's gun policy. Today, I'm surrounded by five-year-old boys sitting with their moms at the next table. Now I'm the one with a gun on her hip.

The gun makes me more fearful than I could have imagined.

Keep in mind that there are people who genuinely think I'm crazy because I believe permitting terrified little mice like this a voice in governance is likely to lead to the loss of human liberty. What the writer clearly doesn't understand that it is not the gun that makes her fearful, fearfulness is her essential state of being.

She's not the only one. I have personally witnessed women reduced to tears by the sight and sound of men checking to confirm that their guns are completely unloaded. It was like seeing someone come unglued because the driver buckled his seatbelt.

Rex May (a.k.a. "Baloo") has been cartoon-slinging for a long time. Reprinted from his Blog Ex-Army at ex-army.blogspot.com
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