During a question and answer session with students, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky asserted that America’s “extremely unusual gun culture” is a “reflection of fear and desperation” in an “unusually frightened country.”

“A large part of the population thinks we just have to have them to protect ourselves. From who? From the United Nations, from the federal government, from aliens, maybe from zombies,” Chomsky said, arguing that gun culture is rooted in fear of future retribution.

“A large part of the population thinks we just have to have [guns] to protect ourselves. From who? From the United Nations, from the federal government, from aliens, maybe from zombies.” - Noam Chomsky

“I suspect that. . .much of it is just recognition at some level of the psyche that if you’ve got your boot on somebody’s neck, there’s something wrong, and that the people you’re oppressing may rise up and defend themselves,” he said.

According to Raw Story,Chomsky’s remarks came on Feb. 7. During the course of the question and answer session, he compared American pop culture’s fixation with a zombie apocalypse with Indians, slaves, and “Hispanic narco-traffickers.”

Watch: Chomsky mocks America's gun culture

“[O]ne major theme in popular literature is that we’re about to face destruction from some terrible, awesome enemy,” Chomsky said, citing literary critic H. Bruce Franklin and his book, War Stars. One sub-theme of such literature, he said, is that the foe “is someone we’re crushing.”

“So you go back to the early years, the terrible enemy was the Indians,” Chomsky said, declaring that “[t]he colonists, were, of course invaders. . .whatever you think about the Indians, they were defending their own territory.”

The professor argued that the enemy has evolved over time; after the Indians, it became slaves and the fear of a slave revolt. The fears even continued into modern times with “Hispanic narco-traffickers,” and they contribute to “the extremely unusual gun culture in the United States,” he said.

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