Shootin’ for Fun

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of having lunch surrounded by gun fanatics. No matter what these characters have to say for themselves and their “constitutional rights” to own an armory, there is a pretty good chance that most American gun owners are either dangerous neighbors or crazy scared. Maybe both. Jim Jefferies pretty much wraps up all of the rational reasons society should be get worried about gun owners. He blows off the “bullshit arguments and lies” that are the cornerstone and marketing plan of the NRA and its friends. Not one of these guys was man enough to admit that the whole reason they didn’t like gun laws or any attempt to design a sane society their whole defense was “Fuck off, I like guns.” In fact, they were pretty damn defensive about both their sanity and the sanctity of our mostly fucked up Constitution.
There is, though, one good reason a huge number of Americans want to have a gun: Yep, men in particular want to be sure they have a handy exit plan, just in case, as Jim said, “From time to time, we all get sad. One day you’re happy, the next you’re sad.” We don’t buy guns for protection from much of anything except depression. Since we’ve abandoned all hope of having a national health care system, especially mental health, that doesn’t bankrupt anyone who doesn’t have a few million in the trust fund, we gotta have guns.
If a manufacturer had balls enough to design a gun for the current gun owner market, it would be a very purpose-built device. For white people (men, mostly) it would look like the pistol at left. The cylinder is solely for the purposes of playing Russian roulette, since most of us only need one bullet. White people commit 75 suicides for every 15 homicides per million people. Black people are different, thanks to the NRA and our half-hearted police state. 150 black people are murdered by guns for every 27 who take themselves out (I’d imagine mostly middle class black people have the same issues as their white neighbors.). The self-defense statistics are so small they are not worth considering. The people who own guns for self-defense are so rationally-and-mathematically-challenged they should be carefully placed in padded rooms and heavily medicated.

The “in defense of freedom” argument is the most bullshit of all gun nut arguments. Yeah, right, you pussies own guns “in case the government became a bunch of cunts and you all could fight back.” The Revolutionary War was the one and only instance in American history where that actually happened. Sure, there are lots of instances of superstitious nuts going Waco on local police over silly shit like their right to have sex with children or defending their take on when and how the Great Kahuna is going to haul all of his/her children up to the Great Rock Candy Mountain. Careful examination of those situations would reveal that the government might have been less than A-Team’ish in their efforts, but the “bunch of cunts” group has been consistently on the other side of the wall.  In the most recent case, the wad of deranged crackers defending a fellow racist, millionaire cracker’s right to decimate public land for profit and greed, my point was made painfully well. Since 1776, there hasn’t been a single instance of patriots gearing up and heading off to protect fellow citizens who have been deprived of their rights. In fact, in my experience the gun owners have been pretty consistent in their support of the government when it comes to violating voting rights, petitioning for the right to work in safe and fair conditions, protecting the environment, or promoting any “civil rights” that don’t make the 1% richer. If modern white gun owners were tossed back to Revolutionary War times, they would all be Tories.