Victory Soap v. 2.0

In this post on guns and the attitude towards them, Grim quotes a liberal intellectual, who says of our country's "deeply troubling" relationship with guns:

American society, in the absence of an encompassing and stable traditional culture, has embraced the gun as a substitute for that absence, and created a vast cultural ideology we can call "gunism." Paradoxically, this highly destabilizing object became viewed as a baseline and an icon that could somehow sustain us in a new form of nontraditional society.

Blah blah blah. What a perfect illustration of the mushy thinking most liberals engage in these days! Liberals think that civilization is built on words and can be sustained and protected by words. This is because most of them are quivering bundles of sensitivity who nurse the psychic wounds they received in high school when they were called "nerd" and "dork" by their fellow students. To liberals, words have magical power, especially when you call them "laws." That's why whenever something bad happens, their response isn't to change any behavior of their own but to scream for more laws to be written to stop any future bad behavior. This also explains pacifism -- "We'll just talk about how much we disapprove of war, and people will stop fighting!" In the meantime, practical people with guns are busy doing the actual work of trying to keep the barbarians at bay.