Some prominent Republican lawmakers have been delighting in sharing a new kind of Christmas card ritual: arming their family to the teeth for a festive photoshoot in front of the Christmas tree.
Last week, Rep. Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, tweeted a photo of his family all holding firearms, which, according to The Guardian, resembled “machine guns and semi-automatic weaponry, some of which are made to look almost identical to fully automatic weapons.” Then on Tuesday, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., tweeted a photo of herself and her four young sons, each son bearing their own large gun in front of a Christmas tree.
Massie, and then Boebert, were swiftly panned by critics on the left for, among other things, sending out photos of children brandishing guns just days after investigators alleged a teenage school shooter in Oxford, Michigan, in the deadliest U.S. school shooting in years, killed four students and injured more.
Merry Christmas! 🎄
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 4, 2021
ps. Santa, please bring ammo. 🎁 pic.twitter.com/NVawULhCNr
But the images Massie and Boebert tweeted weren’t merely insensitive: They were bold political and cultural statements. The style of the guns, their size, the number of them and the fact that they were being held by young children displayed a disturbing vision of family and safety — one that speaks to a zeal for guns that exploits the right to bear arms as part of a right-wing culture of everyday militance. That culture, which is racialized in nature, in turn makes our society less safe — and helps create fertile soil for extremist violence.
The power of these images lies not just in the guns but in who can wield them with cultural impunity, and toward what end.
One striking feature of Massie’s and Boebert’s Christmas cards is the distinct cultural milieu they reflect; it’s hard to imagine people from other racial, ethnic and political backgrounds pulling off something similar without right-wingers depicting them as monstrous. Had a Muslim family sat before a mosque holding up huge guns, the image may have gone viral in conservative social media circles as a symbol of imminent Shariah; had a Black family dressed as Nation of Islam devotees waved big rifles in a holiday card, the photo probably would’ve been deemed a sign of a coming race war against whites. Even if these other hypothetical families were exercising legal rights to bear arms, they likely would be characterized as threats rather than champions of American gun culture. (It bears noting that in the 1960s, Republicans in California — including Ronald Reagan, who was governor at the time — supported the passage of a gun control law in response to the Black Panthers’ use of guns in public.)
The Boeberts have your six, @RepThomasMassie!
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) December 8, 2021
(No spare ammo for you, though) pic.twitter.com/EnDYuXaHDF
In other words, the power of these images lies not just in the guns but who can wield them with cultural impunity, and toward what end.
On the latter point, these photos speak to a troubling kind of cultural and political outlook.









