Now I got Bathing Ape, I got DCMA
I got brass knuckles hanging from my neck in my chain
I got a model 26 but she stays in her place
I got a Kershaw neatly tucked inside in my waist
I thought of this old lyric a week or two past, prompted by legislative attempts to legalize brass knuckles in states where they remain illegal. For reference, brass knuckles are currently legal in 12 U.S. states. 17 states restrict them via concealed carry prohibitions while others prohibit sale and carry but not ownership. Some states deem them illegal under any circumstances.
The debate seems a bit amusing to me. It’s almost as if we’re arguing over some horse and buggy regulation, which we’re afraid to repeal because we might unleash a wave of horse-drawn carriage incidents which have only being kept at bay by the force of a 200-year-old law. Would anyone use* brass knuckles to commit crime and mayhem? Do people do this in the roughly-quarter of the nation in which they are entirely unregulated? The mere mention of the device, though, got me thinking of a song from a few years back.
The song Keep Your Hands Off My Girl is, apparently**, a bit different than what the band Good Charlotte usually writes. It is supposed to be funny, its rap/metal sound notwithstanding. The context of this above-cited section is speaking with the voice of a nightclub DJ who is talking about how the girls he meets, when performing, like to sport high fashion luxury brands (Dior, Chanel. Louis Vuitton, HG and YSL). Our DJ wears stuff designed by the Good Charlotte guys themselves along with perhaps several thousand dollars worth of weaponry.
That last implication seems to be missed by most people – include many Good Charlotte fans.
For example, I came across an angry rant about the apparently-misogynistic lyric – heard as the singer bragging about abusing his young***, fashion-model girlfriend. In fact, I’ve seen all kinds of misheard versions of the above four line, many which make even less sense. For what it’s worth, I cribbed the precise wording shown above from the internet but it tracks what I hear when I listen to the song.
Let me explain it.
A Glock 26 is the sub-compact version of the Glock 17, the company’s standard 9mm pistol. It’s functionally about the same as its big brother but is designed to be concealed on one’s person. A Kershaw is one of the more popular knife brands – not stupid expensive but also not a cheap knock-off. For example, the Kershaw that “Gibbs” carries on NCIS runs about $300 these days. The Glock probably lists about $700 but sells for a good bit less. Again, not particularly pricey but also not discount bin.
Ironically, the Madden brothers are from Maryland, where carrying a pair of brass knuckles is illegal without permit (which I can’t imagine being granted so you can wear them as a necklace). Maryland is also what’s known as a “shall issue” state for concealed pistol carry. If the singer really does go clubbing with brass knuckles, a knife, and a Glock hidden on his person, and is caught, he’d probably be convicted of multiple felonies.
But in States where the laws are not so restrictive, there is nothing particularly offensive about this “fashion” choice. In fact, one might even read into these lines an advocacy for responsible defensive gun use. The singer goes out in public practically dripping with weaponry and yet has no intention of every using any of them (“she stays in her place”), not even in reaction to the “hipsters mean-muggin’ on” him “all night long” and attempting to draw him into a fight.
Take this as a context when reading Holman Jenkins; recent (paywalled) editorial piece titled Gun Owners vs. Gun Nuts.
If you can’t read it, I’ll offer an elevator summary. The author suggests that our society could be improved by separating responsible gun owners from the gun nuts among us. He cites an excessive obsession with firearms reported for several recent criminals including – perhaps a little off point – the case of the National Air Guardsman who leaked a trove of highly-classified government documents to gamer forums. He suggests that the fetishization of guns has destroyed the traditional gun culture in America and that, in order to reclaim it, a national public outreach campaign should be employed – much as the effort to stigmatize cigarette smoking has dramatically changed our view of using tobacco in public (or, really, using it at all). He makes clear he is not proposing an anti-gun campaign and understands that, should it become such, it will fail in the task for which he proposes it.
At first blush, a pop star using knives, guns, and brass knuckles as a fashion statement sounds like exactly the “fetish” that Jenkins is talking about. Is it? Or is this, as I suggest, a bit of a tongue-in-cheek statement about responsible gun ownership?
Almost unrelated, I have just started watching Narcos on Netflix streaming. That show uses, as a dramatic centerpiece in the opening episode, the Public Service Announcement (of sorts) from Ron and Nancy Reagan wherein she urged America to “say yes to life and, when it comes to drugs and alcohol, just say no.”
Her sentiment is reasonable. Most of us – especially those of us not enmeshed in the use of recreational drugs – would agree that the simple joy of living life is, in and of itself, worth celebrating. Drug habits and drug abuse can prevent us from taking full advantage of what we have. She wasn’t wrong and, in the larger context of her speech, she wasn’t off-base.
Yet reducing it all to “just say no to drugs” trivialized her message and turned it into something counter-productive. It was flipped on its head – used as proof the the tribal elders didn’t know what they were talking about. Worse yet, turning it into a “national campaign” to change the society-wide attitude toward drug use almost certainly has to be looked back upon as a policy failure. It was a misdirected message – a variation on preaching to the choir. However many “squares” might have found the national “just say no” campaign effect effective, when it came to the actual, intended audience, the 80s teens, it fell flat. How many jokes have been made over the years about the frying pan illustrating “your brain on drugs?” Compare that to the number of kids who were actually scared straight by a frying egg. If any.
Likewise, there is nothing wrong in what Jenkins asserts. There is a certain subculture that treats firearms like toys and, worse, combines that lack of respect with a reckless, confrontational aggressiveness. See, for example, videos on line of young YouTubers posing with guns before blasting a hole in the ceiling of their parents’ basement. He also, correctly, warns that his proposed campaign, if seized by the virulently anti-gun crowd, would create something that would backfire even more than the “just say no” campaign. As much as he gets right, I think he completely mischaracterizes the problem, the culture of gun owners, and the “culture” of the people he wants to target. I’m going to take a stab in the dark here – I think Holman Jenkins has had little to no contact with firearms nor the regular citizens who own and use them.
Based upon my personal experience, the “gun culture” in America tends to be very serious about safety and responsibility. The more formally a group is organized, the more no-nonsense their line. That said, these are still all happy, friendly people that like to laugh and tell a joke (and shoot firearms). I’ll grant you that, from the outside, a little bit of off-color (or even black) humor on the subject may be indistinguishable from a glorification of crime, violence, and murder. From the inside, though, I doubt anyone could make that mistake.
The solid streak of black humor does not seem so unreasonable coming from a community that feels like it is constantly under siege. I’ll offer an example, a cartoon, that has been recently floating around on social media. The folks I’ve seen posting it do so with the subtext that I (the one who shared the picture), too, am prepared if anyone dares to commit violence against my home and family. And yet it is a joke, not some statement of intent. I know of nobody that actually, really wants to have a violent and deadly gun battle in their own home. The point, and even the sub-subtext when posting, is that of deterrence****. “Don’t come to destroy my home and family, I am prepared to fight back.” Si vis pacem, para bellum, and all that.
My point, though, is that anyone who has reposted the cartoon probably does fit, one way or another, Jenkin’s designation as a fetishist. If a photo of a wall of guns doesn’t give you a shiver of pleasure and desire, you probably wonder at the sanity of people shiver with pleasure at such a sight. But for those that do, we would never mistake a gun collector for someone who would shoot at congressmen out playing charity baseball. Nobody would, with or without Jenkins’ massive public awareness campaign.
I have no doubt there are people in this world just itching for someone to try them – to start something that will end in violence. Contrary to Jenkins’s thesis, though, these people would already be shunned by the “good” gun culture. Are shunned.
The letters to the editor in the Journal said all of this more quickly (the article is already more than two weeks old) and far more succinctly than I have. Several say much the same that I have above, just a little more clearly. Others agree and amplify what Jenkins has called for, and many wishing to brush aside his cautions on the message and hammer home the need for banning guns. Each in their own way, they help make my point.
Jenkins is wrong in his identification of the problem and wrong again with his solution. Sorry.
*Just to be thorough, I have no doubt that, every once in a while, somewhere in this wild and crazy world, someone commits a violent crime using brass knuckles. I just can’t believe that this is any more common than crimes committed with a brick, or a bowling pin, or the business end of a high-heeled shoe. Or to put it another way, I cannot conceive that there is any meaningful, statistical impact on crime achieved by the regulation of what, these days, seems more of a museum curiosity than anything dangerous.
**So sayeth some fans on the internet. I have never been much of a Good Charlotte listener and haven’t taken a shine to any of their work outside of this song.
***The songwriter was also in his late 20s when he wrote this, so making sense of the argument is a stretch.
****To be honest, if someone were to get into a shooting fight in their home after having posted a joke about how they’re eager to do so, that might come back and bite them in a trial. Most gun owners understand that someone who ever ends up using a firearm against another human being is going to be held to a higher moral standard than the rest of us. Gun owners do communicate this but it probably wouldn’t hurt to do it more and better. I don’t think this kind of education, though, matches with what Jenkins is calling for.