I love you, America, and this is precisely why I need to tell you that you are crazy. “You have lost your goddamn mind” might be a better turn of phrase but the word “lost” clearly indicates prior ownership, and I am no longer convinced it applies here.
There is a variety of reasons one may come to this conclusion. Some are trivial, some are mundane, some may lead one to admire you to the same degree as to consider you mentally encumbered. But there are two in particular that undeniably point to insanity in its purest state: your worship at the altar of the gun and your incomprehensibly unfair electoral system.
I am honestly just about done arguing with gun nuts because there is absolutely no getting through to them on any front whatsoever. These are the people who in a normal country would have been left alone with their unending quest to bite their own toenails in the comfort of a padded room, but, unfortunately, in the United States they control the laws and the political discourse, and we are obliged to engage with them in reasoned, nuanced, respectful debate. Which, of course, is in itself insane, considering that we are dealing with folks who literally dream of shooting someone in the face.
Honestly, having a conversation about guns in this country is no longer an option simply because the pro-gun side has no interest in arguing. It consists of gun lobbyists whose only goal is selling as many weapons as possible in perpetuity, of politicians who have zero interest in the issue beside accepting the gun lobbyists’ money and quoting Bible verses, and of the obsessed who have an irrational attachment to their toys and are perfectly willing to start a civil war in order to keep them.
As such, all of the “arguments” proposed by the pro-gun side are made either in bad faith (by the people who aren’t actively stupid) or out of active stupidity (by the people who duh). It’s utterly useless to argue against the stock inanity they spew out with the predictability of a tennis ball machine after every massacre. The “criminals don’t care about laws” bullshit, the “how about we also ban cars” horsecrap, the “if Soviet people had guns, Stalin wouldn’t have dared” monkey feces.
Actually, let me just take a quick detour to dispel this last chunk of excrement in particular, since I just had it tweeted at me by a fellow Russkie. Here’s the deal, folks. If Soviet citizens had guns, there would have been a 400% increase in cases of murdering a neighbor under the influence of alcohol and a 4000% increase in cases of murdering a spouse under the same circumstances. The NKVD would have been OK. Which, by the way, doesn’t make the USSR terribly different from the United States, where the only outfit of the American armed forces you and your private arsenal stand a chance against is the Salvation Army.
But, as stated above, actually arguing these points is a waste of breath because all of them rest on a sturdy foundation of lies, that being their reliance on the thoroughly misunderstood part of the Constitution. It really is amazing what has come out of the founding fathers’ mistrust of a standing army and a desire to have a disciplined, uniformed, centrally-commanded citizen militia available to put down invasions or internal rebellions. To go from that simple idea, which surely seemed pretty reasonable in the 1780s, when King George could invade at any moment and folks could easily go to war over whiskey taxes, to basement arsenals all across America and the sacred right of any idiot to purchase military-style weapons for the sheer fun of having one… Yeah, y’all nuts, alright.
The time to have this conversation is long gone. Even if the ghost of Alexander Hamilton himself were to appear on Fox News tomorrow and say, “Folks, seriously, this part was written for one specific purpose, which is, like, totally obsolete now that you have the National Guard”, he’d be shouted down for a stupid overrated Puerto Rican opera singer by Lou Dobbs.
Talking about guns will do nobody any good. If a full building of elementary-school kids who were shot like rabbits in the space of minutes didn’t change anyone’s mind, nothing else will. We can give all the moral and constitutional arguments we want, we can point at all the statistics we want, they will just keep wrapping their bacon around their gun barrels and laughing creepily.
The only thing left to do is to outvote them. Until then, this will still be a country that sees nothing wrong with imprisoning a person for possessing a blunt and gasps at the suggestion of outlawing certain tools of murder.
There isn’t and can’t be a gun debate. Debating with insanity is not an option.
