Some Are Born Bubbas, Some Achieve Bubbaness, and Some Have Bubbaness Thrust Upon Them

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Kevin D. Williamson tells of The War on Bubba.

This being the United States of America, a horrifying number of people have been killed in the past few weeks in mass shootings carried out by lunatics of varying descriptions. In response, President Joe Biden, who has never in the course of his 80 long years on this Earth suffered the invasion of his mind by an original thought, has responded the way he always responds: by calling for a certainly unconstitutional ban on so-called assault weapons. He did this after the massacre at the Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, in which there was no “assault weapon” involved—the killer used an ordinary 9mm handgun—but such details do not interest President Biden. All he needs is the familiar enemy, in this case U.S. firearms manufacturers and their detestable quest to make money in business. Of course, in the Colorado Springs nightclub shooting, there doesn’t seem to have been any firearms manufacturer involved, either—that killer used homemade firearms, according to press reports.

But none of that matters, because the gun-control debate is not about guns: It is simply another front in the culture war, oriented not toward the criminal misuse of guns—about which our federal, state, and municipal governments do approximately squat—but about the kind of people who tend to own guns, or at least the gun-owning villains of the progressive mind.

But what of Bubba? Skipping down a bit:

We have a lot of guns in this country. Those aren’t going away. We have a Bill of Rights in this country, too, and that isn’t going away, either. We have three choices: 1. Get serious about gun-related crimes short of murder; 2. Pretend that this is all about middle-aged Bubbas who like to shoot scary black rifles; 3. Do nothing. As far as I can tell, it looks like we’ve settled on a combination of 2 and 3—and that is grotesquely irresponsible.

Given that so many important Democratic constituencies have long held a hostile view of law enforcement, you’d think that telling a bunch of cops and prosecutors to get off their asses and do their jobs wouldn’t be a very hard sell for politicians such as President Biden or big-city mayors. But these are government employees we are talking about, and the Democratic Party is nothing if not the party of government employees. And that is why, against all reason and evidence, the crosshairs are on Bubba rather than on violent criminals and their criminal enablers.

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Last Modified 2024-01-16 4:47 AM EDT