White Gun Owners, the Left Hates You

If you are a white, law-abiding gun owner, never forget: the left hates you.

If you are a gun-wielding jihadist, leftists will find every excuse to turn a blind eye to your evil and direct their outrage toward white, law-abiding defenders of the Second Amendment. If you are a gun-wielding, non-white illegal alien like the multiple-felony murderer of San Francisco’s Kate Steinle, the left will shield you in a sanctuary city and blame Steinle for being white, pretty, and causing trouble for you by getting in the way of your bullet. If you are part of a gun-wielding black mob torturing and massacring white farm-owning families in South Africa, the left will wag its finger at the families themselves and blame your savagery on their colonialist oppression. The left hates you.

What about white leftists? Do white leftists hate themselves? Yes, although they do love themselves during their ecstatic spasms of virtue-signaling. Hence their self-flagellating claims of their own purported white privilege, cultural appropriation, and colonialist past. But mostly they hate you, law-abiding white patriots – make no mistake about it.

Case in point: a movie review in The Economist bluntly titled, “Hollywood Needs to Fix its Gun Problem,” by BBC and Guardian film critic Nicholas Barber, is one of the most sneering, bigoted, anti-Second Amendment reviews you’ll ever read – that is, if you even bother reading movie reviews anymore, since the vast majority of reviewers are shills for the Democrat Party who don’t understand filmmaking or storytelling but know how to deconstruct movies politically. Or if you even bother going to movies anymore, because the vast majority of them are made by shills for the Democrat Party who care less about filmmaking and storytelling than about pushing Progressive messaging and demonizing conservatives.

Barber begins his screed by dismissing director Eli Roth’s recent remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson vigilante flick Death Wish, this time starring Bruce Willis as a surgeon whose wife is murdered in a home invasion. Frustrated by law enforcement’s apathetic approach to the investigation, Willis takes justice into his own hands and gets it, not only for himself but for others victimized by criminal scum. Because the left always takes the side of criminality, however, Barber disapproves. “Apparently,” he writes, “this sort of justice makes America a safer and happier place.”

Well, Death Wish is a only a movie, so there isn’t actually anyone going around like Willis’s character, “blowing bloody holes in carjackers,” but if there were, America undeniably would be a safer and happier place. Note that Barber isn’t complaining that Willis’ style of vigilantism might accidentally threaten innocent people (which is a legitimate concern); he is complaining that violent carjackers and other predators are getting their just desserts from the end of a barrel. That’s because the left disapproves of guns only when good people use them to stop bad people.

Then Barber moves on to a more recent film, the hugely successful, tense horror/action movie A Quiet Place, starring husband-and-wife acting team Emily Blunt and John Krasinski (who also directed and co-wrote it). Barber is unsettled by the realization that the film not only could make his top ten list for the year, but that “it could be on the NRA’s list as well.”

That’s because Krasinski and Blunt’s characters, a married couple determined to protect their children at all costs, have the politically incorrect audacity to use guns to stave off monstrous aliens that are devouring the human race. Barber disapproves of the film’s suggestion that when you are threatened by invaders, “there is no way you can negotiate or co-exist peacefully” with them, and “in the end, it’s the ability to squeeze a trigger that makes the difference between being a responsible parent and an alien’s breakfast.”

First, invaders are by definition not interested in negotiation or peaceful co-existence. If your country – or in this case your planet – has been invaded, the time for dialogue is past. Violent resistance or submission are your only recourses. The left, of course, would always opt for the latter. Second, if your young children are in danger of being eaten alive, then yes, the ability to eliminate that threat by squeezing a trigger efficiently does indeed make you a responsible parent. I don’t know if Nicholas Barber has any children, but here is a tip: refusing to take up arms in defense of your children’s lives does not make you a spiritually and morally superior human being; it makes you an ideologically-warped coward of the worst degree.

And yet Barber seems to have a problem with this. He points out that Krasinski has said in interviews that his movie “isn’t really about ravenous extra-terrestrials; it’s about ‘the extremes you go to as parents to protect your kids.’ Meanwhile, Roth has said that ‘Death Wish’ is ‘really about family and protecting your family.’ So that’s all right, then,” Barber sneers. Yes, it is. It is not only all right but moral to use guns to defend and protect your family when necessary. Again, these are only movies, but even in the real world Barber and the left would rather that decent people – “right-wing gun nuts,” he calls them – be unable to protect their children and only evil people and the government (who are sometimes one and the same) be armed.

“One of the fondest fantasies of Second Amendment obsessives,” Barber writes, dripping with contempt, “is that a private citizen with a box of ammunition could fend off the US Army, should the need arise.” This is mendacious and insulting. No has ever said or believes this, but since people like Barber don’t actually care to know any gun rights advocates or debate them on the merits of their reality-based arguments, they are forced to create absurd, reductive straw men to ridicule.

Barber eventually gets to the crux of his conflicted response to this film, despite its acknowledged cinematic excellence: the protagonists not only wield guns, which is bad enough, but even worse, they are white, rural, and – gasp! – good-looking. He declares that, in A Quiet Place, “[d]efenders of the right to bear arms will also see flattering reflections of themselves in the film’s heroes, a photogenic white family that lives on a backwoods farm.” Barber either isn’t aware that movies routinely star photogenic actors and actresses – which would be bizarrely clueless for a film reviewer – or more likely, he resents the fact that A Quiet Place features photogenic white, gun-owning, rural folk. He would prefer that despised demographic to be depicted as slack-jawed, inbred, toothless, morbidly obese yokels to match the bigoted leftist elite’s self-flattering stereotype of flyover Americans.

It is absolutely unthinkable that Barber or any other left-leaning film reviewer would ever criticize a film for featuring photogenic non-whites, or good-looking whites playing liberal characters. But attractive stars playing white gun-owning farmers could make such types sympathetic to audiences, and that’s unacceptable.

I don’t know what John Krasinski’s politics are (which is a good thing), but they aren’t sufficiently woke for Barber. He disparages Krasinski for having acted in Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, “so he is obviously happy to be in films which push an anti-Democratic Party agenda.” That’s an interesting criticism, because he’s clearly saying that a true story in which a handful of American patriots are forced to use guns to fend off mobs of Islamic terrorists because the government failed them is anti-Democratic Party. In any case, Barber actually accuses Krasinski and other directors who use guns in their movies as “the NRA’s answer to Leni Riefenstahl,” because Barber and his ilk believe the National Rifle Association consists entirely of white gun owners, and law-abiding white gun owners are the new Nazis.

“When films like ‘A Quiet Place’ tell us that a shotgun cartridge will answer our prayers and solve our problems, we shouldn’t be so quiet about it,” Barber concludes. And when the left takes bigoted, demonizing potshots at decent American citizens, and urges that we be disarmed, we shouldn’t be quiet about it either.