WATCH: Lauren Boebert Glamorize Gun Fetishism. She’s the Poster Girl For the Mentally Ill Amongst Us

Sometimes I feel like the character in the Dead Zone, waking up from a coma after a number of years. What happened to America? When did we become a country of gun fetishists?

Firing a gun is all well and fine, something that I learned how to do myself, but this glorification of weapons of death and violence, especially when we have carnage in our schools, stores, music festivals, you name it, on a regular basis is a form of mental illness.

If this is the new “cool” count me out. I’ll be a nerd. This is some kind of worship of instant power. It’s like people who think money will solve all their problems. Yes, money and guns will confer a certain power to the possessor but beware of the destructive power as well.

Promo for the Western Conservative Summit, where Lauren Boebert spoke a few days ago. pic.twitter.com/raFau2EdO3

— Ron Filipkowski ?? (@RonFilipkowski) June 8, 2022

I grieve to see marksmanship bastardized in this manner. I truly do. I enjoyed my own recreational shooting. I shot moving paper targets at a gun range. Whoopee. But I’ll say this, there was a certain enjoyment of mastering hand/eye coordination, and a gun is a difficult instrumentality to handle, when you first start. So I enjoyed it. It was simple recreation. I also shot at outdoor ranges, with targets at greater distances.

Needless to say, I knew other people who shot for sport as well and we talked. These were normal people. We’d clean our guns together, drink wine, talk about work. At no time did I identify myself as a member of the lunatic fringe and I had respect for the other people I met at the range. This was in a world where Fox News was only just getting started and the NRA had not yet convinced people that they needed to be armed like a small country in order to survive an attack by God alone knows what mythical enemy the gun lobby was conjuring up.

Then I remember things getting crazier when the right-wingnuts started proclaiming that Obama was going to pick up all the guns and for good measure incarcerate white people in FEMA housing.

Then conspiracy theory videos found a real berth on You Tube and away we went. The Muslims were going to invade and invoke Sharia law, unless the caravans coming up from Central America and through Mexico beat them to it, in their takeover. So you better be armed for that, no question.

Buy more guns, have plenty of ammo stashed. Jim Bakker started selling freeze dried survival foods that could last you for twenty years, he said. Get out the barbed wire and put it over the fence, while you’re flying the Confederate flag over the compound. Adopt a Rudy Ridge/Waco mentality. It’s only a matter of time before the black helicopters come to invade your private world and carry you out of your swamp fevered dreams into God forbid, reality.

America is mentally ill. We didn’t get there overnight. Nobody sick ever does. It takes a while. But if you can look at the House hearings on weapons taking place this week and at this ridiculous clip of Lauren Boebert strutting her stuff with all the heavy hardware and tell me that we didn’t take a serious wrong turn somewhere in our collective journey, I would really like to hear your explanation.

Nothing good can come of this fetishization of the gun. Nothing. This may have started out being about the Second Amendment but where we are now is the confrontation of the cult of the gun fetishists with normal Americans and that’s why it is getting ugly.

We have allowed a sick and dangerous subculture to grow in this country. Again, I quote Nikita Khrushchev, “We will take America over without firing a single shot.” He was right. We’re firing on ourselves. Nikita is looking up from Hell and laughing.