I wrote this on my Facebook feed, but decided to cross-post here as a baby step back into blogging.
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I am a gun owner. I have no problem in the abstract with guns, or responsible folks who own guns.
Yet handguns, rifles of all stripes, and all other guns exist for only one reason. To destroy things. To kill things. Whether in self-defense or not, whether someone considers them a hobby, they were created, and thus exist, for no other purpose.
Thus, I have a huge problem with gun-owning folks who make excuses and say trite and self-serving ish like “guns don’t kill people, people do.”
Guns do not exist but to be used to kill things. Every gun owner know this. Those of us who understand the magnitude of that reality and the incredible responsibility it places on us to keep others safe from guns, and those that refuse to.
I have a huge problem with the fact that when Parkland happened there were 300M guns in this country and now there are 400M and most gun folks do not ask themselves how that can POSSIBLY be good for our country.
I have a huge problem with many American gun owners and their refusal to accept that NOBODY needs automatic military-style rifles, ♾ sized ammunition magazines or eleventy-billion guns.
I have a huge problem with the silence of too many responsible gun owners when these murderous rampages happen in an increasingly sick country and someone (again) points out that no, it’s not mental illness. It’s not criminality. It’s not even just violence in the abstract which is the problem.
The problem is this:
It is that in a country where there as been an almost 100% increase in mass killings in the past five years, according to the FBI report that came out today before the murdering of 14 babies and a teacher in Uvalde Texas, it is simply too fucking easy to get a gun (multiple guns) in America including weapons of war against which normal people stand no defensive chance, and use them in anger (or depressed pain, in the case of suicide.)
FULL STOP.
A responsible gun owner would realize that if we have to sharply restrict the manufacturing and ownership of guns until we get down to less than more than 1 gun for every man, woman and child in the country, it is worth it. After all, anyone who knows how to use a gun knows that self-defense requires far fewer rounds than an AR-15 or Uzi or similar holds. They also know that even if you’re planning to survive the Zombie Apocalypse, all that those types of noisy weapons do is ring the dinner bell.
I just made a joke, but it’s not funny. Chalk it up to laughing to keep from crying, I guess.
This American experiment is already on life support, and at least as it relates to gun violence has been in the moral sewer since this problem wasn’t fixed after Sandy Hook, ten years ago. But if we as Americans —ESPECIALLY us responsible gun owners—don’t fix this we are admitting that the lives of our own children don’t mean ish to us when it comes to our orgiastic love affair with an instrument of death by its own design. We are admitting that we don’t CARE if innocent people die.
We don’t care if our own future, represented by the 18 (so far) babies at practically the dawn of their lives, dies.
And we, responsible gun owners and all other Americans who continue to do nothing, prove that we as a country don’t deserve to continue.