Last Sunday's season finale of Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown had Anthony Bourdain sitting in a Las Vegas bar with CNN host Don Lemon, Roy Choi (author of L.A. Son) and actor Wendell Pierce.
As info, Roy Choi's family defended their restaurant in Koreatown in the '92 LA riots using rifles and shotguns.Bourdain, an avowed “New York lefty,” admitted that he likes guns and expressed his respect for American gun owners:
These people in the segment, as many people in red state America — in gun country America — these are nice people. They like guns. As a matter of fact, I’ve gotta admit, I like guns. I like holding guns. I like shooting guns.
He explained more in a blog post about the New Mexico episode:
In New York, where I live, the appearance of a gun—anywhere—is a cause for immediate and extreme alarm. Yet, in much of America, I have come to find, it’s perfectly normal. I’ve walked many times into bars in Missouri, Nevada, Texas, where absolutely everyone is packing. I’ve sat down many times to dinner in perfectly nice family homes where—at end of dinner—Mom swings open the gun locker and invites us all to step into the back yard and pot some beer cans. That may not be Piers Morgan’s idea of normal. It may not be yours. But that’s a facet of American life that’s unlikely to change.
There is surely a lot about guns and about political views that I would disagree with Bourdain. But one statement I can agree with is:
Gun culture goes DEEP in this country. Deep….When people start equating guns—ALL guns—as evil—as something to be eradicated, a whole helluva lot of people are going to get defensive. The conversation so far has illuminated, instead of any substantial issues, mostly the huge cultural divide between those like me who live in coastal cities with restrictive gun laws—and that vast swath of America who live very differently. We don’t understand how they live. And they don’t understand how we could POSSIBLY live the way we live. A little respect for that difference might be a good thing. The contempt, mockery and total lack of understanding for all those people “out there” by deep thinkers and pundits who’ve never sat down for a cold beer in a bar full of camo-wearing duck hunters is both despicable and counterproductive…There are a lot of nice people in this country. A whole helluva lot of them, like it or not, own AR 15s. If we can’t have at least, a conversation with them, sit down, break bread— about where we are going and how we are going to get there, there is no hope at all.
