More Americans need to be acquainted with the Beretta man. He shows how millions of Americans see guns. The Beretta man has a shotgun that’s a work of art. It might be an over/under with a grainy walnut stock, blued metal and engravings of a bird dog and maybe a pheasant on its receiver. Or it might be a semi-automatic Benelli (a Beretta-owned company) with a carbon-fiber stock and inertia-driven action. In either case, the Beretta man stands with his back straight and the shotgun in the crook of his arm. He is wearing a shooting vest and shooting glasses. He has class. He is how James Bond would look if he went skeet shooting. He’s sophisticated, but hardly a snob. He has what the Spanish call duende, a characteristic James Michener said is almost indefinable, as it means something with taste, refinement, beauty, perfection and elegance all in just the right proportion and with no showiness at all. He is what the Japanese mean when they use the word shibui, which is something a Samurai tried to embody, but only could manage in fleeting moments when life and art meet before again separating with a bad gesture or misstep.

Of course, he isn’t any more real than James Bond. But what archetype is? He’s an American icon men want to be. He’s an ideal never reached but, if you do everything right, might be you for just a manly moment when you shoot a perfect round and thereby master yourself. In that moment a Spaniard might proclaim, “Gracia.” This is another word that deals not with things but with the essence of things and so is fleeting in an empirical age that trusts science to answer everything for us while disdaining the effervescent quality of philosophy. Though now misunderstood by op-ed writers at The New York Times, even the fashion set is aware of the Beretta man. Beretta, after all, has stores in Milan, Paris, London and New York. Oh, there’s one in Dallas, too.

This image is what President Barack Obama tried to represent when the White House leaked a photo of him “shooting skeet” with a shotgun held too horizontal for skeet shooting and with a choke missing from the bottom barrel (it takes two for skeet)—clear signs the shot was a stunt. Instead of being the Beretta man, Obama became a laughable parody of something he doesn’t understand, but at least on some level he knows such an archetype exists.

What he doesn’t seem to grasp is that, to people who want to be a Beretta man, or a Winchester man, or a Colt man … guns aren’t a negative thing; they’re a manly a thing a real man knows how to use safely and well. And therein lies the political miscalculation of anti-gun-freedom politicians.

For more, see my column at Forbes.com.

The Candlelight Vigil for Police Week took place on Monday (May 13) in Washington, D.C.’s Judicial Square. President John F. Kennedy signed a proclamation in 1962 to designate May 15th as Peace Officers Memorial Day and the week in which that date falls as Police Week. Police Week’s events have grown over the decades to become a time of celebration, mourning and a great coming together. This year’s Candlelight Vigil was an evening not destroyed by politicians. Thousands of officers and others filled the park. Many came days before to place wreaths and photos commemorating lost officers. An astounding 120 officers were lost in 2012. Though that number is much too high, it is thankfully a 50-year low.

After the event and meeting officers from around the country, I wondered about heroism in America again. Americans have a great capacity for selfless heroism. When the Boston bombers struck, many people ran toward the explosion. On September 11, 2001 hundreds of officers and firemen put themselves in harms way to save people they didn’t know. There are many more everyday examples occurring right now. Sometimes, however, I worry that even though many are heroic today we are nevertheless starting to lose touch with what heroism is. We too often herald the individual’s action, but then fail to equate the heroic act with the fallible individual. By doing so we unconsciously allow the hero’s code, act and even epitaph to fade away, as if a person can’t truly be a hero, but can only for a short time do a heroic thing. This is why today the only people we’re all ready to still call heroes are those who have died trying to do good. This leaves us without living heroes for the rest of us to meet and try to emulate and understand. Conversely, it leaves us without fallen heroes and the examples they give. (Sorry, fictional characters don’t count. Movie characters can help, but in the end they’re too flat-screen thin to be role models.) It seems to me heroes surround us and we need to see them for who they are and hold them accountable when they fail.

All that said, the police, firemen, nurses and more aren’t heroic simply because they wear uniforms that declare they’re prepared to be heroes. They still have to live up to what a hero is supposed to be. And therein is the crux of the problem: if we allow ourselves to lose touch with what makes a living hero, then we could lose true heroism altogether.

So just six short months after being exposed for having an affair with his biographer, former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus is set to teach a course on public policy at City University of New York. Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer took this same path back to public life after he was caught gratifying himself with prostitutes. Meanwhile, former congressman Anthony Weiner is eyeing a run for New York City mayor. If you recall, Weiner destroyed his career by sexting saucy photos of himself to young women. When asked by The New York Times’ magazine why he sexted the photos, Weiner replied, “I wasn’t really thinking. What does this mean that I’m doing this? Is this risky behavior? Is this smart behavior? To me, it was just another way to feed this notion that I want to be liked and admired.” You’d think after having to explain his lewd messages to his wife, a therapist and the public he’d have a better answer than “I really wasn’t thinking.” Especially given that he wants to run for mayor of America’s preeminent city. After all, Weiner didn’t just lie about his Tweets, he called a reporter a “jackass” for calling him out on it.

So when can a man make a comeback? How about when they can not only man-up and admit they’re wrong but also after they publicly apologize to those they publicly attacked—that takes real moxie. And then, and this is really manly stuff, they somehow have to do their damndest to prove they’ve changed. That’s no less than we ask of a 12 year old who cheats on a math test. By that standard, Petraeus has a chance. Now he just has to prove he has changed. Spitzer, however, is still lost on the public-apology part. Weiner, meanwhile, doesn’t even seem to think her erred. He just seems sorry he got caught. He has slid so far down the Machiavellian slippery slope he doesn’t understand he even has to man-up. Someone taught him along the way that the truth is simply where a person’s talent for sophistry stops. So he has surmised that he has such a sharp tongue and a startling talent for spin that he can still obfuscate his way right into NYC’s mayor’s mansion—no need to grow hair on his shaved chest. The most disturbing thing about this is, given the partisan starkness of modern politics and, for that matter that state of manliness today, he just might be right.

Recently Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead), Amy Chua (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother), Anne-Marie Slaughter (A New World Order), Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo) and more women are questioning, even changing the definition of, feminism—though often in careful and non-combative ways (they are women after all). They’re attempting to redefine or at least deepen the often simplistic and sometimes anti-masculine meaning of feminism, a movement that too often attacks manly men and ignores or belittles successful conservative women (Sarah Palin, Anne Coulter, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Michelle Malkin….). As an author on a book about what makes a man, I find this beneficial. Nothing, after all, influences and even defines masculinity more than femininity. So it was wonderful and enlightening to read an op-ed “Why women should embrace a ‘good enough’ life” in The Washington Post.

Walsh, a former Washington Post reporter, says the debate over feminism “has become twisted and simplistic, as if we’re merely trying to figure out how women can become more like men. Instead, let’s ask: How can women have full lives, not just one squeezed around a career?”

Walsh relates that it’s “hard to grasp now just how intoxicating it was as a young girl to hear Gloria Steinem tell us we could be anything we wanted to be. Or to read, during freshman year at my surprisingly progressive all-girls Catholic school, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, eight years after it was published, saying we could find meaning outside the home.” Friedan was, of course, also opposed to marriage—thinking it patriotically forced women into bondage—and was opposed to men being men. She even propagated a very warped view of men and what men should be. Because of this Walsh says when she “enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975, I held three truths to be self-evident: I would never marry. I would never have a child. And I would have an interesting job, as a writer or a lawyer.”

She then explains why she did eventually marry, have a child and try to find balance in her life that included the joy of motherhood. She found that though the feminist movement in the early and mid-twentieth century was an important civil-rights revolution, it went too far and became too naive. She doesn’t offer concrete solutions—other than trying to find balance—but essays like hers and the voices of the others mentioned and more are a beginning. Hopefully as this debate evolves more will realize a woman can be feminine and still tough, smart and successful; whereas a man can still be manly without being a chauvinist—because a gentleman opens a door for a lady doesn’t make him a sexist and certainly doesn’t insinuate a lack of moral character, strength or respect. These are deep, philosophical questions we need to honestly ask and attempt to answer in order to become everything we can be.

The urban sophisticates losing their masculine traits—the males who never get dirt under their nails—now have their own language. “Manties” are all the rage with these half-men, half something else; the new word is, of course, a contraction of “man” and “panties” and defines silky, revealing undergarments for metro-sexuals—how they keep their manhood literally in the right place is hard to say. Such metro-sexuals also have “mandals” (male sandals), “mewelry” (jewelry for men), “murses” (purses, or as Seinfeld said, “European carryall”), “mantyhose” (pantyhose) and “mankinis” (swimsuit with tops). The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Oxford English Dictionary is including these words in the lexicon. Nevertheless, now that you’re aware of these words, don’t use them. A real man wouldn’t use them except in a joke. Just keep a straight face if you ever cross paths with an emasculated man and ask about their hair and politely say they look cute in their outfits. They’ll get the point—if they don’t, they’re as lost as Justin Bieber talking about Anne Frank anyway. For what a man should be, check out The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide.