Despite the best efforts of the Idaho Republican Party, the state’s people still have the right to propose citizen initiatives, which appear on the ballot alongside initiatives referred by the far-right state Legislature. For instance, Idaho residents this year voted down a grassroots attempt to restore abortion access, as well as a ploy by the Legislature to forever curb marijuana legalization by giving the legislature sole power over the matter.
Those are issues that actually matter which will be dissected by politicos in the weeks and months to come. But I want to talk about the stupidest thing on the Idaho ballot: House Bill 932, which the Legislature placed on the ballot to give We the People the opportunity to choose which firearm should be the official state gun of Idaho.
At the very least we can be happy that Idaho legislators picked six old boomer firearms made of wood and heavy steel rather than some gross modern plastic AR-15 or Glock facsimile (maybe a 3D-printed ghost gun would best reflect Idaho politics, or a Nazi Luger).
Idaho voters faced seven candidates:
- Winchester Model 1894 rifle
- Winchester Model 1873 rifle
- 1873 Colt Single Action Army revolver
- M1 Garand rifle
- Colt M1911 pistol
- Remington Model 700 rifle
These are all proud made-in-America chud guns. The 1894 Winchester’s innovative smokeless cartridges made it great for putting down labor actions in the Pacific Northwest, including the left-wing mining union uprisings that state and federal forces suppressed in 1890s North Idaho multiple times with another new military innovation: concentration camps.
The 1873 Winchester is described on the ballot as “the gun that won the West,” a euphemistic whitewash for our long genocide of the Indigenous peoples beyond the Mississippi (if you ever want to feel really cynical, look up what the Union Army was doing in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War). The Single Action Army revolver carries much the same reputation, while the Remington 700 is a deer hunting rifle so beloved by outdoorsmen that the US military has used them to snipe people across the globe for decades.
Speaking of sniping, in the grand tradition of pointless leftwing infighting, I must critique the rationale of the South Idaho branch of the Democratic Socialists of America for its endorsement of the Colt 1911 for its supposed anti-fascist merits as the sidearm of choice of American troops in World War II.
While South Idaho DSA is correct that the 1911 was a “weapon against fascism” in WWII, it was also a tool of futile butchery in World War I and related American imperial misadventures, such as our efforts to snuff out the Mexican Revolution. Their assessment of the year 1911 being “the year that the first socialist was elected in Idaho” would also be news to those 1890s radical miners whose elected Populist Party local government was overthrown by the US military. As anyone in North Idaho will tell you, the city slickers down in Boise are always a little out of touch with Panhandle politics, socialists included.
Pound for pound the M1 Garand rifle did more to liberate North Africa and Western Europe from Axis fascism than the humble 1911, but it placed dead last in Idaho’s election (behind the 1911). A reflection of Idaho’s far-right politics? The stakes are low enough that it’s a conclusion I’m willing to jump to. The M1, of course, also has a dirty postwar history. As a rifle mass-produced to win a world war, the US government has used its vast surplus to arm everyone from the doomed Army of the Republic of Vietnam to modern Haitian cops.
That’s the problem with choosing to honor a firearm in the first place. Killing machines are inherently problematic things. Like most elections, the choice for voters came down to selecting the least worst option, and as they often do, Idaho voters picked the worst one: the Winchester 1873.
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