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Ask Dr. Babooner

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We are ALL Dr. Babooner
We are ALL Dr. Babooner

Dear Dr. Babooner,

I can’t seem to get my pacifist niece to like me, even though I’m really a gregarious, lovable guy.

OK, it’s true that I have lined the perimeter of my property with barbed wire, own more guns than some third world countries, and will expound at length about why jack-booted government thugs are planning to surround the house to take away my freedoms.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not a nice person. I laugh. I’m kind to children. And I like puppies and Disneyland, just like every other proper American. So why doesn’t she warm up to me?

I will admit that some people who feel the same way I do about certain things have committed terrible acts, and they can be kind of scary, especially when you get them going on the Second Amendment. But if you could see me the way I see me, I’d seem perfectly reasonable to you.

Noble, even.

I tried to convince my niece that I’m not insane, but she says if the government really wants to come after me, my arsenal will be useless. But in my mind I am George Washington – the leader of a popular uprising that will prevail against overwhelming odds and become a beacon for the world before it morphs into a merciless tyrant that will try to crush another brave someone exactly like me more than 230 years from now!

That would make me incredibly famous forever – and she’d be famous too because she’s my niece! But she just doesn’t get excited about it in the same way I do.

It’s not that different from those who imagine being the winning quarterback in the Super Bowl or a global singing star by impressing the judges on The Voice. These are harmless fantasies that people need to help them face another day.

I sometimes hear my niece say things like “follow your bliss’ and “be the most authentic version of you you can be”, which I think she picked up from Oprah. Not my thing, but I’ll defend to the death her right to watch it.

So why does she scoff at my dream?

Intensely,
Gregarious Uncle Needs Niece’s Understanding To Survive

I told G.U.N.N.U.T.S. his dream is unsettling for his pacifist niece because its realization relies so heavily on firearms, which are the opposite of harmless and much more frightening than football or singing. Everybody wants to be celebrated, but perhaps if he wants to win over his niece, he needs to construct a more benign hero fantasy for himself.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?

28 thoughts on “Ask Dr. Babooner”

  2. Good morning. GUNNUTS, if you really want to win over your nice, I believe you should rethink your position on guns. You seem to be a very political minded person who stands up for your principles. Get to know some of the people who want to put limits on the ownership of guns. They are also people who stand up for their principles and are very political. You might find that they are a good group. You might begin to understand why your niece finds you scary. You might find that it is more fun to hang with them than with the people that agree with you on stock piling guns. If you joined the group that wants put limits on gun ownership you would be a hero to them and to your niece.

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  3. Dear GUNNUTS,

    I am the dear niece and sister-in-law of whom you write. Face it Unc, you are boring. You might be all the fine qualities you list above. However, you talk of nothing but your guns when you are around me. I find that Neanderthalic. I am interested in people who are wordsmiths. Yesterday on this blog there resided INTERESTING uncles who play with words making interesting combinations of new words and who learned interesting old words too. Now THOSE ARE MY KINDA GUYS. We might even call them Funny Uncles. OK, NOT.

    They did not even use an f-bomb once to intensify their attractiveness.

    And then there is your NRA membership Unc. Really? You need the right to own war machines to blow away what? Wild Turkeys? Unc, you are just boring.

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  4. Deargunnuts
    If you really want to go down in fame. And glory and assure both you and your niece a place in history and a 3 day stint on the front page and lead story of our news based society , shoot her. I’m not sure from an attention grabbing point of view what would be most news worthy
    1) wound her, hold her hostage and hold a press conference
    2) kill her,set up a live booby trap and hold a conference yourself proclaiming whatever you want to proclaim
    3) kill her kill yourself let others make up stories about your motives
    This last one seems to be real popular these days and gets lots of people on the front page for a day or two
    If you could figure out a way to fake a murder suicide like the guy did who faked his kids ride in that balloon last year then you’d be alive to enjoy it, I think I’d prefer that but then again I’m not the whacko here, you are so you get to decide.
    By the way do you use multiple styles of barbed wire to surround the compound or all the same kind and do you go for circular presentation where it loops like a slinky or straight back and forth in fence pole lines? Just curious.

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    2. No Gunnuts. Ignore tim. I think he is just pulling your leg, right? He says he is not the whacko and I am hoping he hasn’t gone whacko. You are just pulling Gunnuts leg aren’t you, tim?

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  5. Dear GUNNUTS – while the second amendment says that you have the right to keep and bear arms, it says nothing about ammunition for those guns. To make peace with your niece, quite literally, you can take the first step and get rid of any ammunition you have for your guns. You can have all the guns you want – make a lovely sculpture out of them (maybe use your barbed wire to hold it together), your niece might appreciate the art and will interpret the political statement I’m sure differently than you.

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  6. Daughter was ranting all the way to Bismarck on Monday about her Economics teacher, who insists that Ronald Reagan was our greatest president and that Obamacare is one step closer to Communism, as well as the school safety officer who spoke to her Law and Justice class extolling the virtues of semi automatic wapons and why they need to be legal. Neither of these wackos fooled her for a minute. She understands that some people out here might need a shot gun to take care of a skunk or a coyote, and deer and pheasant hunters are ok and probably necessary. It was gratifying to see her outrage.

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      1. Some do, many don’t. Daughter always wonders what the one Chinese-american student in her class thinks when the econ teacher is railing about the Chinese economy and how we are at such risk from it. At least the the young woman in question has the consolation of knowing she will attend MIT next year and the econ teacher/wrestling coach isn’t going anywhere.

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  7. GUNNUTS – I doubt you can make your niece see your point of view, just as she probably despairs of making you see HER point of view. Doonesbury ran a nice flashback over the weekend, talking about how many people died from guns in America since 9-1-1. Many more folks than those who perished in the twin towers. And I completely agree with your niece about the government wanting to take you out — if they wanted to, you’d be gone already, despite your barbed wire.

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  8. The gun problem in this country is not, and never was, about the average sport hunter. Attempts to conflate reasonable gun control with a ban on hunting or to equate your seasonal hunter with the rabid fringe of the NRA membership is completely misleading.
    The biggest problem facing gun control is that there is a cohort of individuals in this country that sincerely believes that their greatest and most imminent danger is from home invasion by bands of armed “others”. Sometimes those armed intruders represent the central government, but more often, I believe, they are imagined as members of minority ethnic or racial groups. That this is a real and palpable belief is evidenced by the testimony given by Gayle Trotter:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/30/gayle-trotter-gun-control_n_2583098.html
    She isn’t just some random wacko that managed to get a little air time. She was selected as a spokesperson for that world view.
    Since these individuals aren’t operating in objective reality, it is easy for organizations like the NRA and for certain politicians and, of course, for gun manufacturers to fan their fear and exploit their mania. The trouble is that this group is sincerely panicked by the prospect of imminent firefights on their home ground. They aren’t just building up an arsenal, they are modifying their homes with consideration toward the penetrability of the walls and taking classes in military-style armed exchange.
    But how, I wonder, do you disabuse these unhinged folk of their irrational fear? There are plenty of threats to their well-being that are infinitely more likely, such as climate change, but most of those threats are not ones that can be resolved, for better of worse, by a single, personal confrontation.
    I suspect these folks are not much prone to nuance or to gradual solutions. I don’t know the answer to that…

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    1. In my 68+ years on this planet, I’ve yet to meet or know one single person for whom a gun was used defensively, but I’ve personally known four who died by gun. One accident and three suicides. Now then, I either live in a bubble or defensive gun use is rather rare. The unhinged fringe is scaring me because their irrational fears indicate that their emotional brain is wholly disconnected from their rational brain on this topic. We’re only 5% of the world’s population, own 50% of the world’s guns, and claim 80% of gun deaths among 23 developed nations. I have to wonder how 300 million guns (equaling the US population) makes us uniquely “free”, yet this is precisely how these shiny steel objects are viewed. I’ll never understand it.

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    2. To paraphrase an old saying, “When the only solution you have is a gun, you transform every problem into something you can shoot.”

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  9. I tried going hunting with a friend two times, It wasn’t of interest to me. I am willing to make use of domesticated livestock for food. My Dad’s family made use of deer as a source of food. I think I would have a lot of trouble killing a deer. I am not opposed to well regulated hunting. There is very little chance that I will do any hunting so there are no guns in my house except a very small one my brother-in-law gave us. I don’t know where it is kept.

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  11. I would have liked to post a video of Peter Case’s Put Down the Gun, but the YouTube videos are all live versions with muddy audio. The definitive version is from the 1989 album The Man With the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neotraditionalist Guitar, an overlooked treasure. Some of the lyrics:

    Well I don’t want to swear it but it’s something that I’ve heard
    A gun in the first act always goes off in the third
    Now I don’t wanna hurt you, I don’t wanna fight
    But there’ll be no third act at all if someone’s killed tonight

    So put down the gun, put down the gun, put down your gun
    You can put down the gun, put down the gun, put down your gun
    Put down your gun and we’ll talk.

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