"What time is it, boys and girls?"

"It's machine guns and great big explosions time!"

That's right, it's Knob Creek time this weekend. I'll be headed south today with Shootin' Buddy so as to hopefully take in the Patton Museum at Fort Knox again (and this time not forgetting my camera,) before going to the shoot proper tomorrow.

While I'm at the gun show there, I'm hoping to find

...a rapid-fire variant of lower part of the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, a type of firepower component that was outlawed in America for a decade before then-President George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress allowed the assault-weapon ban to expire in 2004.

...because that would be awesome. Hopefully it'll include the shoulder thing that goes up.

Then I'll mutter and seethe in inchoate rage, as I hear and pass along strange, racist conspiracy theories about socioeconomic factors that are far over my little peasant head, what with its prognathous jaw and hint of an occipital bun... Or at least that's what Will Bunch would have you believe I'll be doing there.

Shootin' Buddy likes to refer to Sunday's NPR entertainment as "liberals sitting around and feeling better than you," and that's the exact same vibe that comes out in the writings of Bunch, a guy who writes about the hinterlands west of the outer suburbs of Philly (and their inhabitants) with the same mixture of patronizing pity and repressed loathing that characterized the journals of Victorian Brits roaming the backwaters of the Zambezi. Want another sample?

And on that human level, the common denominator I found time and time again was fear -- whether it was folks whose jobs vanished when they were in their late 40s and early 50s who turned to Glenn Beck or a group like the Oath Keepers to figure out who to blame, or people seeking an outlet for their "discomfort" over a rapidly changing America that had so suddenly placed a black man with an unorthodox life story in the Oval Office. But in a group setting, raw fear can get masked by bravado crossing the line into hate.

I half expect him to tell his readers that they need to help these poor befuddled haters, that they need to Take Up The... er, White Man's Burden, as it were.