Shooting and raping everyone because we’re just so free! Can’t be helped neither, because dead Connecticut kindergarteners and Columbine christians are just the price we must pay for freedom. Several generations of rape victims too. And if this isn’t really happening — it’s actually just crisis actors paid by the gun control lobby and ugly feminists making shit up because men don’t like feminazis — that’s still an indictment of our way of life.
Though unlikely. More plausible that dead kids and raped girls are the result of outbursts from psychotic white man-children descended from a ruthless racist patriarchy who spend too much time url and don’t know how to act irl. Hands perpetually crusted from manic masturbation in the soft glow of laptops or smartphones to the most repugnant sex acts imaginable. Guys who begged other guys to help them talk to girls before the internet. And after just settled for jacking off to it. Unable to form any relationships at all, even with other straight white christians just like them because both the trench coat mafia and meatheads are so maladjusted. It’s no coincidence almost all mass shooters are privileged white boys from the right side of the tracks. If you’ve never been wrong your entire life, why suddenly reconsider.
Shame, sanctimony, victimhood, resentment and entitlement all rolled into speechlessly angry and indignant, quivering fat-balls. High school outcasts and heroes alike, all bound for similar futures once the ravages of fast food and too much tv catch up with them. Pasty, flabby betas who wouldn’t make it through round one of SS recruitment yet bizarrely boast of loyalty to an alpha male, master race ideal almost none of them live up to. Doomed to never leave their parents’ basement; because despite however much they might hate the world, it hates them right back even more.
And now many of them are armed. Thanks to a sentence written in 1791 by cis-white slaveowner aristocrats who would build a country that still believes in magic more than 200 years later. Two things right away: Like Bill Hicks said, god didn’t put dinosaur bones there to test your faith guys; he put you here to test ours. And in 1791 things were very different: guns only fired one shot instead of full auto, took a minute to reload a single round, and were so large and cumbersome it was impossible to conceal them enough to enter a church or school and open fire.
Now tell me again how any of that is relevant to machine pistols today. Or how militias with hunting rifles and handguns are going to shoot down attack helicopters or ground attack aircraft and ultimately overthrow a government that remains of the people, by the people and for the people.
Transparent backpacks, cowardly cops, cars and swimming pools
“Students must carry transparent backpacks; and cars and pools kill more kids than guns so those should be banned too” is a uniquely totalitarian, unexpected alternative logic from freedom-humping real mericans. Extant gun control laws do nothing to prevent school massacres because freedom-humpers can’t admit guns play a key role in all shootings. And everyone is already armed anyway. There are more guns than people in merica; there aren’t more cars or pools. So yeah, what gun control? It’s been very ineffective like libertarians and sovereign citizens have long asserted. Psychos and wannabes who conservatives whine ruin gun ownership for law-abiders don’t give a shit about the law, just like constitutional purists. Militias actively talk about overthrowing the government, which is illegal. Only hypocrites pretend to care; the rest of us just ignore the law when incongruous or inconvenient to our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Nothing more merican than that!
Less freedom is cool with me if kids aren’t targets, but I’m surprised repugs can get behind it. Seems like some conservative stereotype infringement of personal liberties. Limbaugh and O’Reilly would loathe it, which makes it gospel! So they quickly return to their senses: “Gubmint overreach is pointless and naive because kids have no trouble getting drugs. And tv coverage of mass shootings just encourages the troubled ones to blow each other away questing for their five minutes of fame.” Their answer: be even freer! Except for drugs and homos; got to ban that ungodly sinful stuff because Jesus loves you and we are all every last one of us god’s little children and redeemable.
That answer is wrong. Personal freedom poses too great a challenge. Disarm everyone so kids can go to school without fear of young thugs, the trench coat mafia, cowards posing as police and all decent armed law-abiders just having a bad day who might suddenly crack too. The increasing frequency of mass shootings notwithstanding, it’s still relatively rare to be a victim of one. Fears about that statistical improbability certainly don’t justify arming everyone and turning schools that for now remain just shooting ranges into the ok corral or a warzone. More big brother all around for an entire nation of man-children who require constant adult supervision. Freedom is just too dangerous for us dummies.
And amid all their thinly veiled racist cacophony of personal liberties and blue lives matter, gunowners point the finger at police who fail to react and protect kids when the regular mass sacrifices occur. Fair point. Cops who don’t do their job are cowards. But anyone from a small town can comment on the low caliber of local police in modern America: eager and keen to shoot sometimes armed young thugs, but just can’t bring themselves to stand up to troubled teens exercising their second amendment rights.
It’s indefensible, just like regular school shootings. But keep the faith patriots: “guns protect everything of value — vips, art, money — so the only reason we don’t use them to also protect kids is because liberals hate them.” Mighty white and christian of them to hold such privileged dismissiveness of others’ life when it becomes an obstacle to their pursuit of weekend warrior happiness.
Blame the liberals and media
Another example of conservative hypocrites missing a chance to compromise with big gubmint overreaching liberals is when Al and Tipper Gore years ago started the conversation about dangerous threats posed by easily-influenced and troubled youth who play violent first-person shooter video games. But back then family values volks went for their throat over freedom, even though they were taking the moralizers’ side. Violent video games and tv are indeed bad for us. But far as I can tell, the only people dismayed by America’s self-immolation are liberals like the Gores and former first lady Obama with her healthy school lunch program that hillbillies treated like the apocalypse.
Fat monsters eating ourselves to death on fast food in trailers streaming ufc and spanking it to torture porn after church defending naked freaks’ rights to shoot up waffle house while watching black people on rent-to-own-tvs excel at sports and entertainment yet hating them the whole time because they’re keeping good white volks outta them thar jobs saying grace and beating the children in an alcoholic, pain-killed stupor the whole time dreaming of striking it rich and making it big.
Values voters have no idea what’s good for even themselves, so they should not expect empathy from demographics they mock and marginalize. Many Americans are born racist, christian and conservative, then subsequently choose not to taunt women, minorities and gays, nor believe in magic. But go for it unrepentant repugs: it’s a free country. Raised among white supremacists I also love freedom of expression, but have the decency and common sense not to say mean shit to the less privileged and call it free speech. Those just like me who choose to continue manifesting all the worst aspects of white culture do it by choice and are not victims. Justifying individual liberties with as many bodies as they like is an atrocity. Several hundred dead kids should absolutely get in the way of their warped and dangerous concept of living in the free world.
Bizarrely, this gun debate seems to cast secular humanism as more moral than the holier-than-thou, christian family values culture that saved-on-Sunday hypocrites assail alone in their private time when the lights are out, they think no one’s looking (except magic Jesus) and hence feel free enough in the greatest time and place for a straight white man to ever be alive to rub one out to something that would make him suicidal if his own daughter did it. And never mind the link between those repressed victorianisms, lack of access to contraception, teen pregnancy, unwed mothers, unhappy future school shooters and the crumbling household. “Can’t let kids cowering helplessly behind tables and bookcases get in the way of my freedumb!”
Free speech? Sure, say whatever you like. But don’t be surprised if women, minorities, gays and the thinking class don’t welcome your coming out the closet to endanger us or simply don’t take you seriously. We should definitely make America great again rather than wallow like pigs in this sty we’ve let it become. Although most conservatives are far too proud to be an American to ever countenance a heresy like that. Their prized free speech notwithstanding.
Abel Cohen is a linguist and historian: abeljcohen@gmail.com