I have a major character defect. I have a really low tolerance for fools. Generally I am able to keep it covered up. Every once in a while circumstances just make it seem impossible to tolerate them any longer. Typically I just allow stupidity to enervate me. Sooner, or much later, I recharge and practice tolerance. Some things must not be tolerated. This is where I am at right now. I am worn out with listening to condescension from ignoramuses. The need to protect people from gun violence is too important to spare anyone from hurt feelings.
Like a lot of people I feel that guns are kind of cool. Military weapons especially have a dark sort of attraction. I doubt the that Luke Skywalker carried the Star Wars franchise. Darth Vader is the character we bought tickets to see. I understand and share the visceral fascination with guns, especially deadly weapons. Military style weapons are the hard core porn of the gun trade. This is why people lust for them. This is why people need a bigger clip than the next guy. This is why people want faster firing weapons with higher velocity and more potent rounds of ammunition.
The problem is people are unwilling to admit why they really drool over guns. Instead they rationalize their passion into supercilious diatribes about the second amendment and how much they love the constitution. Most of them, like the rest of us, probably lack any comprehensive knowledge of the constitution. It's just a tissue, you can recognize this by how these spurious arguments are reflexively employed.
Try this, Google an image of an assault weapon and post it on Face Book with a comment about it as not being a suitable hunting rifle. Some knucklehead will respond with a predictable verbal sprawl about the second amendment and foreign invaders (likely the no-longer existent Soviets for Pete's sake!) forestalled by American patriots armed to the teeth! Or look up the CIA world-book statistics on crime across countries and post these then check out the response. You will be invited to emigrate elsewhere even if the stats you are posting show the good ole US of A in a favorable light! Post a petition to congress demanding they come up with some kind of plan to diminish gun violence (unspecified) and the response will be diatribes questioning your love of country.
It is amazing to me that the reaction to mass murder is people lining up to buy their own killing machines. They are spurred on by the fear that if they don't get one now, they may not be able to get one later. Then they would be shit out of luck when the inevitable time comes and they need to kill a whole lot of people. Let's be honest that is what these weapons are for.
If foreign invasion seemed imminent, as it was when the constitution was written, perhaps these psycho-sexual-death-machines would make sense. What are the real facts today? The truth is we have had at least a half dozen mass murders in the past twelve months. We have not suffered invaders since 1917 when Pancho Villa launched a couple of raids into El Paso and parts of New Mexico. Those didn't really amount to much and the only real invasion was by the British in 1812. Clearly you are much more likely to be shot to death by a real American than some invading foreigner.
So people are madly preparing themselves to shoot down a whole lot of people. Their justification for doing this is some non-existing threat. Only paranoid nut-jobs believe there are real threats, and those are the very people who carry out these mass killings. It makes no sense unless you somehow profit from the weapons trade, then it has some craven sort of Faustian logic. Meanwhile the NRA peddles it's virulent propaganda to the willingly deceived. They parrot this poisonous pablum in a vain attempt to disguise their lechery for weapons that have only one utility, murder. It is intolerable to any rational person.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWQPZ-taYBs
Russell
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