The National Rifle Association often describes its commitment to the Second Amendment as a physical attachment. A couple of decades ago, you had to pry the guns out of Charlton Heston’s “cold, dead hands.” Today, Dana Loesch claims that only the “clenched fist” can preserve our freedom. As she narrates in her 2017 appearance in the National Rifle Association’s “Freedom’s Safest Place” video series:

They use their media to assassinate real news, and they use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movies and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again . . . all to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia, to smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, and bully and terrorize the law-abiding. . . .  The only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.

Such astringent rhetoric suggests something profound about the kind of politics in which the NRA engages: namely, the organization doesn’t just lobby for gun laws; it also shapes the very meaning of American gun culture.