In the wake of the 2004 election, there was much made of the ?moral divide? in the country today: Almost all across the spectrum of political commentary, writers noted that the voters that made the real difference in reelecting Bush were the red-state moral boosters who also happened to be at the polls to quash propositions related to same-sex marriage in their state. Never mind that the states where this trend played out most prominently were already solidly in favor of Bush. Never mind that, up until Election Day, the most pressing issues for the electorate seemed to be terrorism and the war in Iraq. No ? morals were now the talk of the town, and the media was going to get to the bottom of it.

            The attempts by the media to understand red morality are too various to recount here. There was the ?what do they want?? approach, where someone would sift through the piles of exit poll data or, if they were more adventurous, trek to the heartland to talk with the farm seeds in Des Moines. There was the ?political strategy? approach, which involved an analysis of the inroads that conservative Republicans have made in areas of the country where people feel neglected by their Democratic brethren and have responded to red-populism. But perhaps the most amusing, bemusing, befuddling, fumbling, and insulting attempts go to two reporters, one from CBS news and one from NPR, who adopted what I?ll call the ?anthropological approach?: learning about reds by doing what they do.

            And what did these brave and plucky field researchers do to enter the mind of the red man? They shot a gun. Emily Yoffe, a contributor to Slate.com, went beyond the urban confines of Washington, DC (where firearms are illegal) to a shooting range in Maryland to learn what it feels like to pop a few shells at some clay pigeons. Steve Hartman, a commentator for CBS?s 20/20, upped the ante by venturing into the wild to hunt for his Thanksgiving turkey. Both enjoyed themselves, even if they were variously successful: Yoffe learned that she?s a natural shot, while Hartman learned that he?d prefer the frozen variety to waiting five hours for the real McCoy. One is left wondering how either would respond if given the opportunity to shoot a real, live bird.

            But that?s all beside the point. Whether successful or not at their respective tasks, the underlying message conveyed by both of these commentators is the same: It feels good to hold a gun. As Yoffe?s describes one episode in her experience,

           

I stepped up to the line and looked at the target?a paper plate with a 3-inch black bull's-eye?Ricardo had stapled to a pole 21 feet away. A few days before I had taken a yoga class, and during the breathing I envisioned myself aligning the gun's front and back sights and slowly squeezing the trigger. Now I held the revolver, cocked the hammer, and shot. I hit the plate just southeast of dead center. Ricardo told me to keep going, and I start to punch a hole in the target. Maybe I could teach yoga at the NRA!

 

By contrast, Hartman?s description of his revelatory moment is more pointed:

 

I?d never been hunting in my life, so I hired a turkey-hunting guide named Preston Stevens to show me how it?s done. We started with a pumpkin.

It was really interesting. I normally hate guns and yet, just standing there, lording over that helpless household vegetable, was really quite intoxicating.

Before I knew it, I was craving an NRA membership, and I could almost taste that wild turkey.

 

Get it? It?s not that guns kill people. It?s not that people kill people. Rather, it?s that guns make people want to shoot and kill. Guns generate power (or at least the will to it). As described by these reflective reporters, firearms are qualitatively different from other tools that are used to accomplish such mundane tasks as popping corks and slicing cheese ? occupations that one assumes a pair of blue-staters would find more familiar, no? One can control the impulse to use the grater or the corkscrew, but the Übermensch mentality that a gun provides is, as Hartman so presciently put it, ?intoxicating?.

 

And that?s what is so offensive about these little exercises in anthropological reporting. Not only do they attribute agentive qualities to firearms, which is a questionable proposition at best, but they (and Yoffe especially) fail to make room for even the possibility that their reaction to their first experience with a gun is not necessarily what motivates others to buy, keep, and use firearms. So these beginners got trigger-giddy. So they feel like little Billy bad-asses. Doesn?t that say a lot more about their own mentality than it says about the thought processes of others who come into more frequent contact with guns?

 

Apparently not. Whatever their stated intentions, these reporters accomplish the exact opposite: Instead of bridging the gap between those for whom stricter gun-control legislation is the solution of all of society?s ills and those who cite the Second Amendment more often than they act under its protection, Yoffe and Hartman succeed in only reaffirming what they likely already believed (why else would they have done the report?): that gun owners are all just a bunch of pissed-off yokels who get their rocks of when they?re popping a cap in Bambi.