You don't really hear any reports of violent "pro-maskers." It's not much of a thing. We have video clips aplenty of anti-mask Americans freaking The Entire Hell out at being forced to wear a strip of cloth over their sneeze-holes during an ongoing deadly pandemic, but there are no gun-toting public health believers invading state capitols to scream that masks need to be made mandatory in public settings. It's almost as if being a paranoid conspiracy freak about the gun thing naturally translates into being a paranoid conspiracy freak about a host of other things, but that would imply that people who visibly parade around with guns in public places are inherently unstable people, so it's best not to think about it.
This doesn't mean, however, that pro-science, pro-public health Americans aren't losing patience with the screamers among us. The Washington Post brings us a bit of reporting from the mild-mannered camp, and their guff storage repositories sound rather full. Truly, their guff-taking abilities now seem limited at best.
"Nobody complains that their freedom’s being taken away because they have to wear pants," one of the Post's quoted activists notes. He and others want mask mandates to be more aggressively enforced. This isn't something that individual "essential" minimum wage retail employees should be tasked with enforcing at risk of personal injury. Mask-wearing should be mandatory in public and retail spaces, period, full stop, and enforced as such.
There's a difference between enforcing mask mandates as "store policy" and as "government-mandated public health requirement." Simply allowing store employees to say "it's the law" rather than "it's our preference" would presumably shut a good percentage of current crackpots up; anyone still being aggressive after that is more clearly a problem for law enforcement.
It's not the best option, though. The best option is clearly a gun that forcibly shoots masks onto people's faces.
Clearly, this requires government funding. It would combine something American law enforcement officers and militia-minded "freedom"-shouters love (shooting other Americans in the face) with something they hate (science-based public safety). A perfect compromise. Pair it with the "stand your ground" laws of Florida and other weird states and it would be a bloodbath—of safety.
There may be a few injuries, but they would only happen to people who had it coming.
Other than that, we are stuck with the usual options. Stiff fines are a no-brainer: State governments need money, and anti-maskers presumably have plenty of it since they're not worried about the financial repercussions of coming down with a deadly disease in a nation that tells people with deadly diseases to pound sand. An even better option in terms of public safety would be a brief nationwide shutdown of the sort we should have done in the pandemic's first months.
Close the country down in earnest for a few weeks. Pay everyone to stay home. Deprive the virus of hosts in order to bring outbreaks down to more manageable levels.
I know. You're right. There's a far higher chance of America mobilizing roving gangs of face-shooting mask enforcers than there is of that one happening.
Still, it does not sound like the pro-mask majority of Americans is about to give up. Much likely depends on whether Donald Trump, a delusional toad, is pried from the White House in January. There will be at minimum a quarter-million American pandemic deaths by then, which may or may not finally be enough for the nation to take the pandemic seriously.
