Ask
an NRA member about mass killings, or going way out on a limb,
impending gun control legislation and they'll invariably respond the
way you or I do when confronted with a rate hike from our car
insurer: but I didn't have any accidents! I didn't get any tickets!
There's
a dynamic at work which effects a giant portion of our
society: a careless or irresponsible minority can have a profound
impact on the rest of us. It's just how it is. Nothing more, nothing
less.
Because
so many of us find it impossible to drive without texting, the rest
of us pay higher insurance premiums based on the rising number of
collisions and damage claims that are submitted.
Other examples
stretch across the entire spectrum of consumerism.
Because
some of us believe that immunizing our children actually harms them,
the rest of us cough up more for health care as a result of
higher rates of hospitalization and treatment.
Because
some of us find it necessary to trash a rental property after the
landlord refuses to fetch us mocha double-lattes every morning, the
rest of us spring for larger security deposits when we decide to move
in.
Because
cold medicine contains pseudoephedrine and is easily re-purposed as an
ingredient for methamphetamine, the rest of us encounter a raft of
speed bumps en route to purchasing the formerly over-the-counter medicine that keeps our nose from running.
And
on and on and on it goes. As the enlightened reader of The Square Peg, please say it again: the many pay for the few.
But
in an occurrence almost as startling as the repeal of gravity, gun
owners remain exempt from this dynamic. They are cloistered
in a pretty little bubble because they're, well, special.
Despite
the fact that a disturbing proportion of gun owners adhere to the
production-for-use aesthetic and fire their guns as often as
possible, there is never any blow-back for remaining owners in the manner of increased license fees, scrutiny, etc.
Like
gun manufacturers, gun owners exist on a plane completely removed
from the rest of us, immune to the rules, consequences and dynamics
of our society.
And
this is as accidental as sunrise.
The
National Rifle Association has labored valiantly to protect all
aspects of firearm manufacture, distribution, sale, ownership and use
and keep them as consequence-free as fundraising ceilings and finite numbers
of lobbyists will allow.
Which,
come to think of it, is as it should be. Guns are rarely labeled as
organic because they contain preservatives. The kind that ensures
that through the purchase of said gun, you will remain a saintly
individual for the duration of that ownership.
Because
you own a gun, you will forever be immune to the indignities and
stresses of life, be it impending homelessness, joblessness, divorce,
custody battles or the detritus from a neighbor's tree which
maddeningly and inexplicably falls on your side of the property line.
Gun
ownership virtually guarantees you won't ever go off half-cocked (so
to speak).
This
also applies to any and all residents who share the address with the
gun.
Your
kids will never be tempted to kill you for some perceived social embarrassment you inflicted on them in front of their peers, or for
actual social embarrassment in the manner of a week-long grounding or
the denial of their cell phone privileges for a weekend.
Ditto
your wife when she finds out that instead of looking for a job,
you've been having extramarital sex with the twenty-nine
year-old divorcee across the street for the past six months while she
has been working two jobs to keep things together in the interim.
Kindly
ignore statistics which confirm that the gun you keep at home is more
likely to be used on you than by you. They're compiled
by libtards who, for some unfathomable reason, want to keep you safe.
Let's be perfectly clear: no one should ever
exonerate the likes of Adam Lanza or Stephen Paddock for their
selfish and gruesome carnage. But taking a step back and looking at
the bigger picture, we shouldn't be greasing the skids to EZ gun
ownership, either.
Which
is exactly what the NRA seeks to do.
You
are free to disagree or deny, but even in the wake of the recent mass
shootings in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Congress has before it
legislation which will make it easier for gun owners to buy
silencers—ostensibly to protect a hunter's hearing.
You
can look it up. It's House bill H.R. 367 The Hearing Protection Act
of 2017.
(Like
you, I wonder if these shitheads have ever tried their hand at
stand-up.)
Another
seeks to gift gun-owners residing in states with Concealed Carry laws
with the ability to take that protection with them—even in states
with no provision for Concealed Carry.
You
can look that up, too. It's H.R. 38 The Concealed Carry Reciprocity
Act of 2017.
(Ironic
coming from a Republican-led Congress renown for trumpeting state's
rights, don't you think? Can a woman carry her reproductive rights
across state lines, too? Oh—didn't think so.)
Saddest
of all, there is a piece of legislation which seeks to protect
schmucks like you and me. It's H.R. 4168 and is called the Closing
the Bump-Stock Loophole Act.
Like
its title, it reeks of common sense. Which is likely why in a
Congress as obedient to the NRA as a sixteenth-century wife was to her
husband, it is estimated to have but a six-percent chance of ever
being enacted.
Now
we know what the NRA does. We know what the NRA wants to do.
And we know what the NRA doesn't want to do. In order to
diminish them and shrink their poisonous influence, a new approach is
called for.
Here's one idea:
Being
that one of the most-powerful aspects of gun ownership is the implied
machismo, we start by creating
a public-awareness campaign that suggests that owning a gun is
something less than the ultimate expression of manliness. We then mandate that guns be cast in pink.
We repeatedly reinforce the idea that only pussies use guns. That real men carry
knives and engage in hand-to-hand combat when they get the urge to
kill because their favorite cartoon got cancelled or they can't get
laid.
That killing
people with guns is just too easy. Any peevish, self-pitying slob can
squeeze a trigger. The real shining lights of the mass murder
community are constantly challenging themselves. Pushing the mass
murder envelope. And they embrace the old-school aesthetic of mano
a mano struggle.
Cutting-edge
killers get blood on themselves. They hear the labored breathing of their victims. They feel the resistance
of their cartilage and ligaments. They know when a knife
encounters bone, forcing an on-the-spot rethink of strategy.
None
of this nonsense of spraying of automatic gun-fire from the upper stories of a
luxury resort hotel!
In all seriousness, we
did it with cigarettes. We did it with drunken driving. We can do it
with guns.
Providing,
of course, that we want to.
