Blake Masters' Posing is a Hilarious & Useful Reminder
This column was originally published at the We Aim for Self-Defense Patreon website.
Different people are interested in firearms for different reasons. Some of us - the We Aim for Self-Defense crowd, for example - are interested in doing what we can to defend marginalized communities from the violence of the powerful.
Others - not the We Aim for Self-Defense crowd - want to use them for purposes much more nefarious, whether or not said villainy is intentional. All that is to say that some of us are interested in protecting the oppressed, and some are interested in oppressing.
A third grouping yet may be so craven and calculated that they simply want to take on the aesthetic of being a "gun person" because they think it will win them friends. The racist weakling Blake Masters who recently failed in his bid to win a U.S. Senate seat out of Arizona seems to be one such poser.
We need only watch one of his campaign ads to understand. Yes, the ad is creepy, and yes it weirdly fetishizes deadly weapons.
It's also notable that the explicitly White supremacist pulls up in a German car, pulls out a German gun and repeatedly mentions and fawns over the fact that his pistol is from Germany...
What we're focusing on here today, however, is what a fake this guy is. This ad was doubtless meant to augment Masters' sickly appearance by pairing him with a gun, and what's more to make him look like a regular ol' Southwest Gun Guy (tm).
True enough, who among us doesn't enjoy driving our expensive foreign coup out to a carefully selected photo setting and firing pistols and extended gear that costs several months' of rent in many cities? Still, there are some hilarious red flags in the ad that give us reason to believe that Masters is no legitimate gun enthusiast, but rather that some campaign aide got him a Big Lil Mr. Man gun kit that would hopefully provide assurance the candidate didn't hurt himself while posing for the cameras.
Masters is so, so excited to show us his gun you all. It's a Walther PPK, chambered in 22lr, he proudly tell us. The gun that James Bond himself used!
Red flag #1: Though the fictional mercenary tool of empire Bond is indeed written to often have used a Walther PPK, it was absolutely not chambered in the small plinking caliber of 22lr. They gave Masters the weakest version of the gun available.
Masters says he's wanted this gun since he was a little kid. That's less a poser red flag than it is outright scary if we think of the young White supremacist in the making fantasizing about owning any gun, much less the gun Adolph Hitler used to kill himself.
Shooting into the distance for no reason at nothing is also an awkward look. But when Masters starts going into how much he loves using a "silencer" and that because there's "no sound" you can "feel" the bullet moving, he once again demonstrates what a non gun person he truly is, despite his pained gestures to voters he imagines also fetishize Nazi pistols.
Red flag #2: Most real gun people don't call suppressors "silencers." For one, it's an inaccurate euphemism. Suppressors can reduce the sound of firearm explosions to the point that they are more safe on our eardrums but nothing actually silences the noise a gun makes when fired. Secondly, precisely because of the negative stereotype suppressors have that Masters mentions in the ad - that some assume one would only want one in order to silently become a hitman or something to that effect, instead of perhaps wanting a home defense firearm that won't deafen your entire family in the unlikely but scary event that you needed to discharge it to defend yourself - advocates of owning guns for self-defense often dislike using the inaccurate term because they feel it reinforces the inaccurate and negative perceptions of suppressors.
Masters wanted to appeal to a group of people he has no connection with and, along with the rest of his campaign, the ad failed miserably. The Donald Trump and Peter Thiel fascist-in-training attorney and venture capitalist is no Everyman.
So often we see the use of firearms as some type of problematic aesthetic or signaling of in-grouping or fascistic politics. In reality these tools have been appropriated by liberation groups and turned on their oppressors just as much throughout history.
In fights to end our own oppression we don't cede the exclusive use of any tool - in and of themselves inert - to our oppressors. This is a good reminder that even if our oppressors have a monopoly on the "culture" of certain tools and act like their biggest fans, our own un-fetishized training with, understanding of said tools can easily far surpass theirs.