Tiassa, what is it you object to?
Plenty. Would you care to be more specific and useful, or are you just blithering for the sake of feeling like you have something to say?
(
Hint: You could try
paying↑ attention↑, but, I don't know, would that expectation somehow violate your rights?)
Does everything come down to controlling people in the name of freedom?
Okay, you're on: I don't think you're capable of explaining what that question means.
So what's the deal? Are you just utterly incapable of answering the question—
Meanwhile, if disrupting murder-machine markets results in the need to reload a little more often, or squeeze the trigger for each shot, such that a couple more people live through the moment, why would you object?
—or just that antisocial?
Seriously, what is it with gun cult preachers that making sense is just too much to ask? Is the problem a lack of competence or a dearth of competency?
Here, try it this way: The question of
controlling the nutjobs↑ can actually have an interesting, compelling context regardless of your personal unreliability—
i.e., apparently inconsistent application of the words, "control" (the nutjobs) and "controlling" (people in the name of freedom)—because while they cannot be controlled according to the context of uneducated, paranoid gun cult preachers bawling about others "controlling people", one way to slow the proliferation of stupidity is to not honor ignorance, bad faith, and general malice.
Toward which end, it is true that I do object to
disingenuous↗,
pathetic↑ whining↑ about rights. How dare we talk about this event in a context that threatens whose rights ... to what? As I have asked others, just what liberties do you so fear for that you would denigrate yourself this way? And I know y'all don't like the question put that way, but please attend the urgency: If a building burns down, they say, "Hey, maybe next time we shouldn't cover a highrise in flammable material." But no, not with guns. Something goes wrong and we start hearing that now isn't the time. There is a chorus of cultists just waiting to recite the Stations of the Gun.
People don't like to vote for tax increases on excess wealth because they, too, want to be excessively wealthy, someday. Just like they don't want to tack irresponsible gun owners to the wall because they might need to be let off the hook for killing someone, someday. And just like they don't want to give up all the extra baubles and toys to make it easier to kill literally tons of people ... because ... why? I mean, honestly, what, they might need to kill tons of people, someday?
CBC's
Ideas ran an encore episode from 2016, today,
"Gun Crazy"↱:
(39:09)
Paul Kennedy: So, what could be done that would actually start the conversation? We're in this sort of culture of war with people who are pro-gun and people who are anti-gun, and they say they need to have a conversation, at least those who are anti-gun say there needs to be a conversation. How do we get that conversation started? I mean, what does it take?
Chris Hedges: You can't. It's not a rational conversation, because most of these people think that they have their weapons in their homes for when the federal government comes to get them. And I can assure you—
Kennedy: Well, that's the [Second] Amendment, isn't it? I mean, that's why there is a right to bear arms.
Hedges: Right. But I can assure you, the moment a SWAT team shows up, they're going to run out of the house with their hands up. You know, the idea that you're going to take your AR-15 and hold off, you know, a trained platoon or SWAT is insane. I covered the wars in the Middle East, and Yugoslavia; everybody had guns, they often had AK-47s, but, you know, at a moment like that, it's kind of suicidal. So it's a fiction ....
Yeah. One might need to kill tons of people, someday. And here's a political irony that inevitably arises when we turn to guns and rights and all of this: That'll be cops and soldiers they're dreaming of killing.
And, besides, Chris Hedges is right; in the moment, the greater portion will choose to live. And if they're white enough, they'll be given the chance. And a jury might even acquit.
Seriously: What rights are the cult preachers on about? The Las Vegas question is going to focus on, what, your right to go plinking cans with some kind of crank to easy-squeeze your trigger like a machine gun? Your right to convert an AR-15 into a fully automatic weapon for the purposes of home defense and hunting small, fast game?
At the threshold between who lives through this and who doesn't, which one of these rights are you willing to tell the dying is worth it? "Thanks for buying my right to [_____]"—
what?
Now, it's true there are substantial questions of rights in other mass shootings, like a stalker's right to bear arms, but what is the substantial right at stake in Las Vegas? It's like the bit about the right to arm toddlers. Seriously:
Why is it never the time to discuss these things?
But we already know the answer. It's not really about the right to have the guns. What good are the guns if you can't kill people with them?
It's all about jealousy and homicidal lust.
____________________
Notes:
Kennedy, Paul. "Gun Crazy: How fetishizing guns shuts down debate about them". 2016. Ideas. 2 October 2017. CBC.ca. 3 October 2017. http://bit.ly/2hIJUNO
