Pima County GOP’s gun fetish has a long history

by David Safier

The Pima County Republican Party's recent Glock raffle is history. So this is a good time for a little historical reflection on the use of the conservative gun fetish in Southern Arizona politics. Treating guns simultaneously as sacred talisman and call-of-the-wild paean to sex and violence — talk about mixing sacred and profane! — is a well established tradition with the local GOP.

Their most famous linkage of guns, violence and campaigning was Jesse Kelly's June, 2010, announcement on the Pima County GOP website of a gun shoot fundraiser for his CD-8 campaign against Gabby Giffords. After the shooting at Giffords' Congress on Your Corner event six months later, the graphic at right was all over the news. Its unpuctuated sentences run together, sandwiching "remove Gabrielle Giffords" between "Get on Target for Victory" and "Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."

Kelly's gun cred wasn't limited to this event. It was a major part of his campaign, as can be seen from these two professionally created images of Kelly, armed and looking very, very dangerous.

For Kelly (and, he hoped, for the majority of CD-8 voters) happiness is a warm gun held at crotch level, always at the ready. The clear message: Real men (translation: Republican men) are always locked and loaded.

But the message isn't limited to men. In LD-26, much of which overlaps Gabby's congressional district, Republican candidate Terri Proud created a video titled, "Tribute to Women and the Second Amendment." It's a collage of photos of local females with guns, including this frightening image of what looks like a 10 year old girl (referred to in the video as "The Spitfire") pointing a rifle straight at the camera. In the video, the candidate herself looks like a mashup of Bonnie from "Bonnie and Clyde" and Patty Hearst from her bank robbing days.

The entire video is below.

This year, months before the recent Glock raffle, Chester Manning, who is running for Pima County Sheriff against current Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, raised campaign funds with a June drawing for a Bushmaster .308 AR-10 ORC, followed by a July Machine Gun Shoot, which included a drawing for a Taurus 1911.

Manning is already advertising his second gun shoot in October.

Expect more gun fun for the whole family when the 2012 election season gets into gear.