Question: Elmer Fudd or Bugs Bunny?

I grew up deep in the woods. It was quiet in the country back then because those who lived there were comfortable living where the world got dark at night.
     Now, the countryside is noisy, because it's filled with city people who are afraid of the dark. They buy a home in the country, fence their yards and fill them with yapping dogs. They buy guns and shoot them night and day with the sound of firecrackers on a string. They shout at everything, watch FOX news and wait for the black helicopters. They sandbag their home and imagine the ‘Gumment' is wanting to take it from them.
     The ‘Gumment' doesn't even know, or care, that they're there. That might even be worse than their fantasies. Nobody even cares that you live ‘out here.'
     And their fierce shouts sound like screams to me: "Get away! Leave me alone!"  Bang. Bark. Bang.
     (When a frog sees a snake it sucks in all the air it can handle, hoping to swell itself up to the point of looking too big to swallow. Machismo is like that. Show me shaved heads and tattoos and I can almost hear that air being sucked in)
     Oh, how I wish they would move back to the city, join the neighborhood watch and buy a streetlight. But they won't, because in this modern American fantasy they are the brave. They are patriots and they are the NRA.
     Am I the only one who sees the irony in the NRA (a Right Wing bunch who asks for Freedom Fries or Freedom Toast because they hate everything ‘French') being led by a prissy Frenchman with a bad comb-over? That Conservatives who talk tough always look like Rush Limbaugh or Carl Rove or Glen Beck? That loudmouth musicians and dopers like Ted Nugent are seen as the ‘tough guys'?
     The guys who can hurt you, and they're out there, are the quiet, wiry little guys with the dead eyes. A Hummer or a Dodge Ram won't make you bad anymore than will a boybeard. I was killing time in Target not long ago and saw an electric razor that shaved your face but left the ‘boybeard.'
     Without it, how would they know?
      In the Deep South of my childhood we all had guns. Every car in the school parking lot had a least one gun in it; maybe a rifle in the rack or a pistol in the seat. Students and teachers alike. But we never shot anyone. We couldn't imagine shooting someone. Beat the hell out of them, maybe - but shoot them? Look back through the newspapers of those times. A shooting was rare and unexpected as a tornado. We weren't afraid.
      If this sounds more like a rant than a blog then I guess it is. Symbols are both powerful and easy to manipulate. When you read a murder mystery or crime novel, do you really want the hero to be flawless and unbeatable? Do you want to know, from the first page, that he'll overcome everything? That he's sure to win?
     Have we lost the confidence that once made Americans more like Bugs Bunny than Elmer Fudd? It was always Elmer, remember, who carried the gun. Bugs didn't need it. I'm a Southerner....I have a house full of guns. I try to keep them clean and make sure the ammo stays dry. The last time I fired one at something it was to kill a rabid raccoon that stumbled up to my porch a year or so ago.
     I have friends who love to ‘shoot.' They go to the pistol range and empty a box of shells at targets. I'm not sure what they see while they're emptying their pistols, but I don't see it.
     I want to see confident Americans, relaxed neighbors and, maybe, drivers who don't look like Goofy in that old Disney short, Motor Mania. It might as well be called Crazy at the Wheel.
     It might help to know this is being written the day after the gun safety compromise was defeated in congress, and my neighbor is shooting away into the air as his little dogs create a dust cloud by running up and down the fence line, yapping. In the middle of four hundred thousand acres of pristine wilderness and I have Elmer Fudd for a neighbor. What's up, doc?
     Bang. Bark. Bang.