By now many of us have seen, heard and/or read the words of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez in the impassioned speech she delivered yesterday in Florida.
Here it is again if you haven’t:
Money quote:
Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this. We call BS. They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.
I’ve been saying for years, during and since my high-school teaching career, that teenagers have much better bullsh** detectors than adults tend to give them credit for. And I think this teenager just issued a clarion call for the next Democratic campaign, and for everyone else who is tired of the masturbatory hero-fantasies of a few million ammosexual gun-stroking ****s (a/k/a Responsible Law-Abiding Gun Owners®) being the only thing that matters in this country.
[Apologies in advance for the harsh language, here and in the rest of the piece.]
Of course the DNC won’t adopt it, but wouldn’t “We Call BS!” be a perfect sort of secondary campaign slogan, analogous to “Lock Her Up!” but with a far more altruistic purpose in mind? Wouldn’t it be great if Democratic candidates on the stump this summer and fall would rile up their crowds to shout out, “We Call BS!” over and over again? Especially in the context of calling for sensible gun control?
Overall I think there needs to be a lot more calling of BS, on a lot more BS. But let’s just focus for today on all the things Emma Gonzalez called BS on yesterday.
In fact, if it were me, I would call BS on the entire concept of “Second Amendment Rights®” (or “gun rights”) because, no matter what the for-profit firearms industry (and its bottom-bitch, the NRA (and its bottom-bitch, the GOP)) has programmed millions of ammosexual gun-stroking ****s (a/k/a Responsible Law-Abiding Gun Owners®) (and the late Right Reverend Justice Antonin Scalia) to believe, the idea that one particular category of manufactured consumer products could plausibly be the subject of a “constitutional right” never made any sense. Nor did it ever make sense that of all the consumer products that were available to 18th-century consumers, the Founding Fathers would select firearms — not food, not clothing, not shelter, not fuel for winter nights, not medicine — as the one indispensible product to which consumers must have unfettered access in the commercial marketplace.
I’ve written far too extensively on this subject to go back over all of it again; the bottom line is that guns are products, goods, chattels, mass-produced manufactured hand-held portable mechanical death toys, nothing more. As a practical matter, one particular consumer product can’t be the subject of a “constitutional right” any more than any other consumer product; the right to engage in commerce and the right to own property (viz., property rights in chattels) is coextensive with any and every other consumer product on the market at any given time. Exempting a product, let alone a deadly one, from commercial regulation because of some imaginary higher-level property right is not only ridiculous, it’s foolhardy.
But the bottom line is that we have to start calling BS on the whole concept of “Second Amendment Rights®” no matter how butthurt the ammosexual gun-stroking ****s (a/k/a Responsible Law-Abiding Gun Owners®) get. We have to stop accepting that framing, and stop letting them get away with it. No matter what compensation the Right Reverend Justice Scalia received from the for-profit firearms industry (and its bottom-bitch, the NRA (and its bottom-bitch, the GOP)) to declare otherwise in the Heller decision, it was, has always been, and remains, wrong and we need to call BS on it at every opportunity.
Progressives have a history of winning by calling BS on things that “everyone” knows, believes and accepts. That’s what progressivism is, essentially; calling BS on What Everyone Knows, and on The Way Things Have Always Been. Now, we have to start calling BS on any characterization or portrayal of guns as anything other than consumer products. Owning a gun doesn’t make you a hero, or a patriot; it only makes you a consumer, a loyal, obedient, paying customer of a multi-billion-dollar industry, for which “supporting the Second Amendment” makes you an unpaid advertiser.
And then there’s everything else that Emma Gonzalez called BS on.
They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS.
Tougher traffic laws decreased traffic accidents. Tougher DWI laws decreased drunk-driving deaths. You could look it up.
And beyond the obvious rebuttal to “Criminals will just break the law” asking “Then why have any laws at all?”, one must wonder why the purported standard of effectiveness, viz., “guarantee that no one will ever do it”, is applied to this area of law and no other.
They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS.
Two words: Chris Kyle.
They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS.
One has to wonder why anyone is worried about gun control when they’d be just as able to “protect their families” and Fight Government Tyranny™, and just as effectively, with a baseball bat, a garden trowel and a 1996 Ford Fiesta. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? Which needs to be deployed a lot more often in response to this sort of BS.
Then there’s its corollary, that killers without guns will just find another way. Good. Let them find another way. Let the Adam Lanzas and the Nikolas Cruzes of the world try to figure out a way to mow down two dozen schoolkids at once with a vegetable peeler and a gallon of gasoline, and see how far they get.
They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.
See, e.g., Australia, Japan, the U.K., &c., &c., &c. For anyone who thinks gun control is an “extreme” position, there is nothing “extreme” about catching up to the rest of the free, modern, industrialized world.
And that’s just for starters. Why all this BS is BS could fill (and has filled) volumes.
And sometimes, calling BS on BS is all we need to do. Just call BS, and keep calling BS; make them explain it. Make them examine and articulate why they believe and accept the BS they’ve been fed by the for-profit firearms industry (and its bottom-bitch, the NRA (and its bottom-bitch, the GOP)). Make them own their masturbatory hero-fantasies and admit that that’s all the phony concept of “gun rights” has ever been about.
So, in the end, thank you, Emma Gonzalez. The first step toward achieving real change on this issue, in politics and policy, like any other, is to call BS on BS. Let’s hashtag it, deploy it, use it, every chance we get; put it on T-shirts, bumper stickers, buttons, signs, whatever. This should be the clarion call for progressives everywhere.
WE CALL BS.