Forget Gun Control, Try Bullet Control

Everyone’s always talking about gun control, but why not bullet control? It takes a lot of equipment and resources to make your own ammo: what gun-owners call hand-loading or reloading. Plus gun powder, thousands of cartridges, primers and the bullets themselves. It also takes loads of time, which is crucially important in the quest to deter all the braindead, ADD pay-check livers who populate America from killing our kids.

God-fearing gunlovers will counter with at least three points well known to those of us who have rubbed shoulders with real America for longer than a campaign:

1. Outlawing bullet sales won’t matter because skilled hand-loaders can press out 500-1,000 rounds per hour (rph), which is still a lot.

2. So were big gubmint to be so naive as to outlaw retail or wholesale of bullets, those guys would just employ illegal immigrants to mass produce them for sale on the deep web, black market blockchain.

3. Which would once more vindicate conservative supremacist logic because it would again mean all yer librul laws can’t stop a bad guy with a gun; the only thing can do that is a good guy with one!

Well en garde, idiot savants. At the risk of conflating several different categories of identity politics, I will just lay it right out there that NRA members by and large tend to be old white christian men who might also harbor latent bigotry against anyone not just like them whom they generally enjoy victimizing and ridiculing.

Most of these crude parents’ basement dwellers and rural man-children with whom I grew up — now suddenly under the impression the rest of us should welcome their coming out the closet in free speech drag as white supremacist, misogynist, homophobes to ironically prove they indeed choose to be exactly how the rest of the world has long stereotyped them — have neither the time, initiative, nor inclination to spend hours working on anything other than the shitty jobs that barely keep their own single income, childless households afloat.

So how do we stop lazy, entitled dipshit merican men who feel the sociopathic urge to shoot one another and even little children sometimes from doing so? It takes lots of time, effort, equipment and resources to make your own bullets; that could be a good deterrent. And the several thousand skilled handloaders who might capitalize on the vacuum as an economic opportunity are easier to track down and jail than confiscating and destroying America’s 270 million guns.

Notwithstanding the far right’s increasing monopoly on the blockchain, there’s really just one choice: They say we can only have their guns when we pry them from their cold dead hands; fine, keep them. Unlike many gun, owners most liberals are not enthusiastic about the prospect of getting the chance to kill anyone; bad guys included. That’s the purview of good guys with guns.But they should have to make their own bullets if the one in a million chance to play knight in shining armor and save helpless teenage cheerleader mean girl christians who put out from the trench coat mafia means so much to them. Selling bullets by the hundreds actually makes that easier! From the secular humanist liberal college process of elimination point of view, it would seem better to just not arm threatening loners and losers in the first place.

NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch isn’t often right, but is when she points out that liberals can’t run a country they’ve never been to. But I have, so send me: Abel Cohen 2018. Rusty bible belt won’t stand a chance; I already know all their best one-liners and have spent much of my life countering them.

Yeah right, optimism we’ll even have elections is perhaps undue. Pubescent outcasts with machine guns and body armor might in the meantime close down schools and our freedom-loving president could impose martial law and cancel voting in the name of law, order and conservative family values decency.

During fast food commercials of course. Between bouts of ultimate fighting, hypersexualized ultraviolence, pro sports and reality tv. Manically masturbating to some hot torture porn after church. Before killing a thousand avatars in some mmorpg first person shooter and counting how many followers all these young leaders have on their fetid social media. Because America’s great again.

So don’t overlook next year’s new back to school essential: bulletproof vests for the littlest ones in your life. If you love your children, it’s either that or arm them. Jesus. Question’s not why some of us hate America a little bit, it’s why the rest of you don’t; not even at all. Because some things — like regular school shootings and what’s apparently a western civ rape epidemic — are indefensible.

Abel Cohen is a linguist and historian: abeljcohen@gmail.com