The Attorney General’s exact words:

What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes. You know, when I was growing up, people smoked all the time. Both my parents did. But over time, we changed the way that people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it.

Cower — interesting choice of words that. Cower is a word more associated with fear than shame in my mind. One cowers in fear. One blushes or hides out of shame.1

It’s a natural inclination in those with a love of power to want to see those beneath them cower. Our proper posture when faced with the disapproval of our betters is on bended knee, shoulders trembling, head bowed in anxious deference.

It’s also interesting that Holder suggests smokers “cower” outside of buildings, doing their nasty deed in private, on their own initiative. Silly me, I thought it was because government regulations and corporate policies require them to smoke only in designated areas outside. I doubt most such smokers feel any shame in the act, though they may huddle in winter.

I wonder, Does Holder cower in shame over his responsibility for hundreds of gun deaths as a result of Operation Fast and Furious and his zealous prosecution of the Drug War?2