2008 Republican tchotchke, and half-sentient symbol of a faux working class, hustler Joe the Plumber advised the father of dead Isla Vista victim Christopher Martinez that “Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
Sorry, chucklehead, but your inanity only trumps itself. With all due respect to your constitutional scholasticism, what you have instead of the right you think you have is the NRA’s and far-right’s propaganda McGuffin.
Indeed, the 2nd Amendment the murder apologists sanctimoniously squeal about was designed to insure that states could defend themselves and the nation as a whole with militias as the alternative to a standing army. 200 years of judicial precedent substantiated this historical truth, and nixed a right to individual ownership. That an extremist, hyper-activist court recently claimed otherwise (though even then did not declare an absolute right, but one open to regulation and restriction) makes this “right” little more than a gun freak joy ride.
But we’re well beyond the point now of disabusing the afflicted of their constitutional confusion, or misapprehension of the Framers’ intent, long past the recognition of the fundamental transgression of common sense, or bantering international gun ownership and homicide statistics. We’re deep into a seemingly irreversible normalcy that incorporates mendacious fantasy perpetuating, and actively encouraging abomination.
Other modern nations and sensible, intelligent people everywhere laugh at the nostrum that more guns provide additional security because in fact it is literally laughable. It’s so laughable in fact it has rendered The Onion virtually sobering now, with the more or less straightforwardly accurate headline, ‘No Way to Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
To say it with a dash less varnish, a country that allows gun fetishists and gun mythologizers and ideological kooks into its mainstream, and then to dictate its crime and safety policies is haplessly cowering, suicidally incompetent and magnificently inattentive in varying degrees, half-stupid and half insane, at the very least for acceptance and abidance of commonplace slaughter, children often the innocent victims.
Nothing happens after these regularly scheduled blood baths, other than additional humiliations of rationality, plain sense and the tireless efforts of righteous people.
The NRA, as part of its evolving psychosis is now the unrepentant enabler of murderers.
What the fuck is wrong with the rest of us?
The Fictions of Ken O'Steen 