For Love of the Gun

An acquaintance I call Second Amendment Sam telephoned the other day and predicted with a cowboy whoop that 2001 would be the Year of the Gun.

Normally I would jump into his face with typical liberal hysteria and proclaim his stupidity and insensitivity and lack of historical vision, but not this time.

Given our new gun-friendly, Texas-toned administration, the intellectual equivalent of being between presidents, Second Amendment Sam may be right.

He is so sure he is, in fact, that he offered to bet me a hunnert dollars that all the iggorant gun laws enacted during the Clinton administration would be melted down and the six-shooter would emerge as the new icon of freedom, by cracky.

Well, all right. I can see Sam’s point. That prediction last summer by NRA Vice President Kayne Robinson that if Dubya won they’d have an office in the White House might come true.

Therefore, as a conniving liberal, I have a plan. Americans have the interest span of an 8-year-old, which is why TV series fade so fast and styles change so quickly. What used to be 15 minutes of fame has been chiseled down to about six.

So I’m thinking, since fads are over-loved out of existence in the blink of a tired eye, why not love the gun to death?

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My plan is to celebrate guns in every form so that interest in them and the love of them will eventually become a surfeit instead of a feast. Then they’ll go the way of the Hula Hoop, the Nehru jacket and the pet rock.

You start with babies. I can see teething rings shaped like Berettas and rattles in the form of assault rifles that rat-tat-tat instead of dingle-dingle-dingle.

The handles of strollers could easily be converted into pistol grips, and there ain’t a cowboy poet alive who cain’t rewrite “Rockabye Baby” into “Mowemdown Mama.”

As the babies grow, you teach ‘em the fun of killin’ small animals. If they can walk, I say, they can pull a trigger. Line up bunnies (especially on Easter) and birds and maybe a squirrel or two. Bang, you’re dead.

For teenagers, the appeal is obvious. All you’ve got to do is make it sexy, forbidden or good to eat and the kids will crave it. Hollywood is awready doin’ a fine job selling gun fun and promiscuity in enticing packages, so what we need now is pizza in the shape of targets and fries that look like bullets and, yahoo, the little buckaroos will come arunnin’.

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Then we go on from there to more subtle innovations, like gun-shaped doughnuts and straws that look like rifles and, at Christmas, candy canes that resemble AK-47s. And speaking of the season of giving, the gift of the Magi (that would be John Wayne, Hoot Gibson and Roy Rogers) might include one of them cute little single-shot muff guns along with the frankincense and myrrh.

By the end of our sly liberal campaign, most Americans will be so sick of guns they won’t let their kids bring ‘em into the house anymore, I mean no more, and the good ol’ boys will get tired of ducking bullets down at the local saloon. New laws will follow.

Pretty soon they’ll demand that football coaches stop carrying sidearms and teachers stop waving .45 automatics in the faces of naughty children and preachers stop threatening sinners with .30-caliber damnation. Even those TV talk shows will have to stop ending in shootouts, as entertaining as that might be.

This, of course, will rile people who like all that stuff and we’ll be right back to where we started, pardner, us against them . . . except maybe now there’ll be more of us and fewer of them. Which is what my whole insidious campaign is all about.

We’ve got to be a little obvious here, because the gun lovers ain’t exactly subtle. NRA President Charlton Heston brandished a gold-plated gun at last year’s NRA convention and vowed that the only way the government would take it would be “from my cold, dead hands.” Now that he’s seeing things a little more clearly however, his attitude might have changed. We’ll see.

But even if it hasn’t, he’ll work right in to our program to make America sick of firearms. I suspect that even Second Amendment Sam might even eventually holster his rhetoric.

So guns all around. Guns for the babies. Guns for the old ladies. Guns for the insane. Guns in prisons. Guns at home, at work, at play, at prayer.

Lock and load, folks. Ready, aim . . . hype!

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com