“I was born in Arkansas, in probably the hardest region of the state. I’ve always had to do with weapons. I personally own 75 guns.” —Darylle Wagnon, owner of a gun store, Ada, Oklahoma
Davids Medienkritik has a very good exposÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?© (with translations) of a recent issue of the German magazine Stern’s ugly portayal of Americans. What else is such “journalism” than anti-American propaganda?
P.S. The scale at the bottom of the picture above goes from “highly prepared/armed” on the left side to “disarming” on the right side.
I’m with you – the portrayal of Americans is hopelessly one-sided in Europe. Too often the stereotype is of a false one of guns, burgers, ignorance and insularity.
But, Tom, do you not think some of your postings do little to soften the stereotype?
Take, say, your posting ‘armed gays don’t get bashed’ with the picture of Pink Pistols, and your repeated mentions of the court case re your impassioned defence of the right to bear arms in Washington DC.
A European with little grounding in the importance that the American libertarian attaches to the Second Amendment might well assume you have an unhealthy obsession with guns, don’t you think?
It’s extremely hard for Europeans to view the passionate defence of the right to arms outside the prism of fanatacism.
So what is anti-American about Americans owning guns?
A disarmed European sees me and thinks “ugly American hillbilly”….I look at him and think “Maybe, but at least I am not a groveling slave!”
When a friend of mine visited from Europe, we went shopping at a local mall. He was horrified to see a store with a wide array of shotguns, rifles, and handguns on sale. Then I told him that I owned several guns myself. He couldn’t believe it. But I think he just might have learned that not all gun owners are homicidal fanatics.
What I think many gun advocates have never quite learned is that being anti-gun is a prejudice much like any other, and ordinary, everyday exposure to the group that one fears is a big part of overcoming the prejudice.
I actually like the gun-toting stereotype. I’m not really sure whether that whole thing is a joke or not.
Among Europeans I know, I don’t recall any being strongly anti-gun except for one nutty Brit. I have Russian, Ukrainian, German, Swedish, and Canadian friends who envy my freedom to buy and use firearms (I’m American) and wish they could do the same.
If there’s anything really “ugly” about the guy in the photo, it’s that he needs to lose a fair amount of weight — a European stereotype of Americans that is unfortunately too often true.
The prejudice isn’t necessarily anti-gun, it’s the connotative response that the hillbilly image evokes. It’s not one of guns, it’s of armed and dangerous ignorance. It may not be true, but there is more to it than being anti gun. Mr Steele makes a good point: many Europeans, especially those that have lived under oppressive states, covet our ability to buy guns.
I fear that I may have slightly misled others by posting the first photo on the Stern site, that of the despised gun-toting hillbilly. If you go to the site — or to Davids Medienkritik, which has translations — you’ll find lots of other stereotypes that feed into anti-Americanism. Notable are the oppressed prison inmate (naturally, a benign looking African-American who is doing a life sentence, no doubt because he was unjustly framed) and a group of Latinos who are doomed to work at dangerous work for no pay and no prospect of any improvement in their lives. I merely used the first in the series.
The Eagle raises an interesting issue about stereotypes regarding weapons for self-defense. I’m not the type to apologize for being able to or willing to defend myself. I’m also not the kind of person that is featured in the Stern lineup, with 75 guns. The hillbilly image (and I don’t want to prejudge the man pictured, since I don’t know anything else about him, but it’s certainly how he’s portrayed) goes with the “they’re ignorant and know nothing about the world, which explains so much about them” consensus that is propagated through most of the German media.
TGP: “The scale at the bottom of the picture above goes from “highly prepared/armed” on the left side to “disarming” on the right side.”
It IS interesting, I think, that the scale equates being heavily armed with being “highly prepared”, which is not exactly a negative connotation in making a case against the ugly Americans…
Or is that a translation problem akin to thinking that being unarmed is equivalent to being “disarming”?
Ross
Sorry for the translation difficulty. Hochgerüstet might be to translate it as “well equipped,” but it has the sense of being ready for war. “Entwaffnend” can have the same meanings in German as “disarming” in English: taking away weapons and having a “disarming” smile.