Let me explain why Henry Repeating Rifles advertises on MSNBC.

Background:

Don’t tell us that Al Sharpton and MSNBC are hypocrites? Noooo!! The Reverend Al opened his show by praising President Obama’s efforts to promote tougher gun control laws. But 28 minutes into the show, a commercial appeared for, of all things . . . Henry Repeating Rifles.

Go to Henry Rifle’s website and you’ll find one rifle described as “big, brutal and beautiful” and noting that it fires ammunition “said to have killed more game, big and small, and more men, good and bad, than any other in existence.” Another model offered for sale, the AR-7, is based on a military rifle, Henry emphasizing that given its lightweight design “you can carry a large quantity of ammunition.”

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The bolding is from Newsbusters, but I left it in because it’s entertainingly direct in its appeal to the MSNBC set. Anyway, Ed Morrissey asks the question:

Mark Finklestein skewers Sharpton and MSNBC for hypocrisy, but a better question might be why Henry is buying advertising on MSNBC at all.

The answer is simple: it’s because of a very common psychological condition that the doctors call SPS. Your average male gun-grabber typically has a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the size of his genitalia: and while many of them sublimate this attitude into a general desire to symbolically castrate the opposition at least some of them will instead be susceptible to a pitch where they will be able to compensate for their male inadequacy by acquiring a substitute. By advertising on a recognized progressive outlet, Henry Repeating Rifles is telling potential purchasers that they are offering a clean and safe phallic symbol, not one of those nasty ones that you can find over at that dirty Fox*. It all apparently works enough to keep justifying the ad buys, so there you go.

By the way: there’s actually nothing really wrong with this particular psycho-sexual neurosis, per se: it’s not like progressive gun owners are any more (or less) likely than conservative ones to flip out and kill people. But I just wish that the Left would admit that they’ve got some strange, fetish-flavored stuff going on in their heads about guns.

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Moe Lane (crosspost)

*…Was that a sufficiently on-pitch parody of the usual pseudo-Freudian critique of gun owners? I don’t have a background in psychology, and I am given to understand that Freud’s theories have been largely superseded anyway, so I may not have gotten the tone perfectly right.

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