From today's You-can't-make-this-shit-up file comes this choice nugget.
According to gun groups who feel threatened by the Obama administration's newfound push for gun-control legislation, January 19 has now been designated "Gun Appreciation Day," which somehow will be somehow different from all the other days gun owners appreciate their firearms.
The timing has raised eyebrows since the new "holiday" falls two days before President Obama's inauguration and because the groups behind it — a coalition including the Second Amendment Foundation, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Citizens and Country, and more — are speaking out against Obama and Democratic lawmakers in particular.
"We need to ban politicians who assault our rights, not firearms that are used thousands of times a day to protect lives and property from criminal attack," Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation tells The Washington Post's Rachel Weiner.
Because Freedom!
What could
possibly go wrong, right? Hey, guns have feelings too, and right now, they could use a hug.
But why stop there? If we're going to celebrate Great American Traditions of Freedom™, why only the one that directly causes a paltry 30,000 deaths a year? This is America, god-dammit, we can and must do better.
I say full-scale genocide deserves its day too.
Like this, for example.
Slavery Appreciation Rally: The founders held slaves, ergo slavery awesome, case closed. Death toll? A mere thirty million or thereabouts, and look at all the nice Antebellum mansions that bought us. Those people sure knew how to live, amirite?
The Smallpox Gala: Ah, smallpox. Unfortunately eradicated, and a pity too, because back in the day, daddy's little helper cleared space for our Amber Waves of Grain. The death toll we don't really know, but over ninety percent of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas is a good guess. Generally agreed to be the largest mass-death event in human history, though.
To close it all off, how about a Sack of Baghdad After-Party? No, silly, not the one that we did on Commander Codpiece's watch; that's small potatoes. Rather, the one the Mongols pulled off in 1258. Great show, Islamic Golden Age over, thousands of burning libraries and, gift bag time, mounds of human skulls. A mere two million dead, but it's only an after-party.
Glorifying sick destruction of human life for fun, profit and freedom –– I say it's a winner.
Or we could just wake up to what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, and realize that our national obsession with violence and its tools is a fucking disgrace that is killing our children and the soul of the nation.
Make no mistake, we are at a cross-roads. The massacre of children in Newtown, may God rest their souls, was a step too far. A great nation, and a great people, cannot live in perpetual fear amidst perpetual slaughter.
And to all those bloody cowards ambling around the landscape with your metal toys on the 19th, believe me when I say this comes from the heart: Fuck You. Cordially.
You're welcome.