I saw Miguel’s post Another Annoying Gun Control Compromise Piece and read the article, and thought I’d take a whack at it’s idiocy.
It turns out that the article Miguel was criticizing was a followup to a first piece. I figure that the best way to do this justice is to start from the beginning of the first article. Usually when I do a takedown like this I will go through a whole article. Since I’m trying to kill two birds with one post, I will truncate to the critical point.
So, from the beginning.
Okay, Now I Actually Do Want To Take Your Guns
Hey there, NRA:
Listen, I know the moments after a gunman opens fire in a school are hectic for you. You have to get your talking points together, you have to mentally prepare to debate a traumatized yet sensible child, you have to look at yourself in the mirror and practice saying that more guns would have made the situation less deadly. It’s a busy time! And since we are always either in the moments after or the moments before a mass shooting, you’re pretty much always busy, I have noticed!
No asshole. It’s because we get attacked and blamed by you fuckers before the bodies are even cold. CNN didn’t have one fact about the Parkland shooting right but organized a two hour anti-NRA hate fest live on TV before all the dead were in the ground.
Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I now actually do want to take your guns.
All of your guns.
Right now.
At least you admit you want the impossible. Now kindly fuck off.
It wasn’t always this way. I have responsible gun owners in my family. I’ve never been a fan of shooting at things myself, but guns sure do seem to have brought joy into the lives of some people I love, and as long as they were stored properly, I never had a problem with them being around. I believed that we should place a hurdle or two between a psychopath and an AR-15, but that’s about as ardent as I got. Live and let live, that was my policy. Even with death machines.
That has all changed. And you changed it.
So now you hate and distrust your own family members? All the red flags are missed by Broward County and the FBI and Nikolas Cruz kills 17 kids and you are going to take out your anger on a brother, or parent, or cousin you have known all your life? Jesus, you are unhinged.
All along, as American life has gotten deadlier, as our kids have gotten less safe in their schools, you have had the opportunity to work with the vast majority of Americans who support the sensible reform of our gun laws. You have had the chance to preserve your own rights as we work together to keep our gun regulations in step with gun technology. You haven’t.
Actually violent crime is down. Since I know you Lefties only listen to your side, here’s an article from Vox explaining how murders are at a 33 year low. What is at an all time high is self-righteous pricks on CNN doing 24/7 coverage of every shooting until you are saturated with it.
All along, there have been opportunities for sensible, incremental changes. This year alone, we could have banned the manufacture of bump stocks, which turn semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones. We could have raised the minimum age for gun ownership from 18 to 21, or instate a national minimum age for long-gun ownership. We haven’t, largely because you have bought our government.
That pesky Constitution, always getting in the way of Progressives just trying to protect people by curtailing every single right. How dare law abiding citizens get in the way of these people.
What you have done is double down. What you’ve done is convince your members that the occasional school shooting, the odd literal slaughter of innocents, is an unfortunate but inevitable quirk of American life, a thing that is necessary to preserve freedom. You have taken to our television screens to tell us that the world is an apocalyptic hellscape, and that the only way to be safe from gun violence is to stock our homes with guns.
No. What we’ve said is that there are ways to stop this shit from happening that doesn’t involve turning good people into criminals over arbitrary regulations that would be ineffective at preventing crime.
Also, it is CNN that is screeching about America being an “apocalyptic hellscape” because of law abiding gun owners.
You pushed legislation that cut funding from the Centers for Disease Control for research on gun safety in America. Research that might conclude that fewer guns would mean fewer gun deaths, which leaves us with…no meaningful research on gun violence in America. Our ongoing studies on car safety have made cars, roads and highways safer—not without risk, but safer—yet no comparable studies can be done on guns.
We pushed legislation that prevented the CDC from being used as an anti gun propaganda generator. When the CDC did study the issue and found that guns were more often than not used to deter crime, Obama buried that shit.
The young people of America are now expecting to witness gun violence in their schools. They are sitting in trigonometry waiting for the other shoe to drop, except the shoe can shoot 400 rounds a minute. That’s the result of all your hard work. There’s your prize. Stand up and take it!
The kids are expecting to witness problems because of 24/7 CNN coverage has warped their perception with bullshit. Maybe if Liberals actually were interested in security measures instead of gun bans the Santa Fe school would have been better secured. But since Marco Rubio doesn’t want to confiscate guns, you don’t want to support his school security initiative.
I was stunned and sad after Parkland. I was heartened by the efforts of the young people who watch their friends get murdered in front of them. I watched you make nice with them on CNN and then, behind their backs, call them terrorists.
The fuck world are you living in? Not the one where David Hogg and the Parkland kids were calling us terrorists and saying we had blood on our hands and faces.
And then this morning I watched the same goddamn thing happen again, only this time at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, where at least ten people are dead. As though all of the marching and organizing and common-sense talking had never happened. As though this ever growing pile of young bodies is worth nothing.
As long as what you are marching for is “lets curtail the rights of 150 million Americans who did nothing wrong” than your march is worth nothing.
So now I’m angry. Now I’m finished trying to reason with you. So now I, a guy who was ambivalent about guns just a few years ago, want to take your guns away. All of them. I want to take them all and melt them down and shape them into a giant sphere and then push it at you so you have to run away from it like Indiana Jones for the rest of your lives. I want Ted Nugent to roam the halls of his gunless house, sighing wearily until he dies. I want to end this thing once and for all, so that all of you who have prioritized the sale of guns over the lives of children have to sit quietly and think about what you’ve done. God help me, I want to take all of your guns out of your hands, by myself, right now.
So your message is “you broke no laws but you own guns so I hate you and want to take your property from you, then I want to hurt you and kill you.” And you wonder why we double down on gun ownership? This is why. “Give up your guns so I can make you suffer” is a really convincing message.
It won’t happen, of course. So let’s meet in the middle. Let’s meet at…literally anything.
What is the middle? You only want to kill half of us? Maybe some light torture?
It’s happening. We tried it your way, and it really did not work. The ground is shifting. Get ready.
We are ready. Fuck you.
So this douche at Esquire got angry and took to his computer to be an internet tough guy. Every fuck thing he said was bereft of facts and was as accurate as CNN’s town hall on guns. There was push-back. So he responded in the only way he knew how. He had to be the victim.
What Happens When You Write About Gun Control in America
Gun-rights activists threaten to shoot you (among other reactions).
I’m sorry fucker, but you did threaten to kill us first. Or did you forget that Mr. Keyboard Bravado.
When you write a piece about America’s unique and uniquely deadly gun problem, as I have done many times for Esquire, you expect a few things to happen: gun-control people will applaud, gun-rights advocates will get upset, and your Twitter mentions will be a mess for a few days.
But when, in the face of another school shooting, you write an angry one about how you’ve finally had it and now you want to take all the guns away—even if that piece ends up being pretty moderate when you actually look at it—a whole new series of events will happen. In case you’re thinking about taking on such an endeavor, here are a few things to expect.
That pile of shit was moderate? “I want to take the private property away from 150 Million people who did nothing wrong, then I want to make them suffer.” By what standard is that moderate?
Gun people will skip the “reading” part and go directly to the “reacting.”
We read it. We didn’t like it. Don’t imply that we’re stupid because we disagree.
You cannot trust everyone to read past a punchy headline. That’s why plenty of people—plenty—ran right to their keyboards to say: “You’re taking my guns? You’ll get them bullets first.” I would also accept—and did, oh my God, so many times:
- “Go ahead and try, the streets will be awash in blood.”
- “Good luck confiscating all those guns yourself, really hope you don’t get murdered by law abiding citizens lol.”
- “Molon Labe.” (I’d never heard this one before, and it appears to be the gun lobby’s version of “Bazinga.”)
- Lots of memed-up screenshots from Tombstone and Deadwood, which, if you’re trying to convince me that 2018 America is not the Wild West, are less than encouraging.
Again, your argument was “I want to personally take away your guns and kill you, but that’s impossible, so I’m just going to fantasize about it on paper.” Now you’re upset that we said “dare you, fucker.”
Also, how do you not know what Molon Labe means? You really got the best use out of your liberal arts degree, didn’t you? A real student of history and the classics.
This is not a problem that’s endemic to one side of one issue, by the way. Plenty of people of all political persuasions will get worked up over a headline and develop an opinion instead of reading the piece. But in my experience, only gun-rights activists will do this and then add that they’re going to shoot you.
YOU THREATENED TO KILL US FIRST! Jesus! “There was another school shooting now I have to murder NRA members” is something we see all the fucking time.
Had any of these folks bothered to read the piece, which was only 800 words and I am not James Joyce
You got that right. Nobody will remember you in 80 years.
[T]hey would have seen the part where I said: “It won’t happen, of course. So let’s meet in the middle.”
“I only want to kill half of you and lightly torture the rest.” Fuck you.
I am coming from a place of passion, but I am willing to compromise. Yes of course, in the churn of yet another school shooting, in the only country where this happens anywhere near as often as it does, I want to make the problem go away. In these all-too-common moments, my most special wish is to make all the guns disappear.
How magnanimous of you? Just how many people are you going to disappear too?
There are a lot of impractical things I want and cannot have, so I must compromise. But compromise is not acquiescence. The other side has to give up something, too. I want a world without guns, but I will settle for a handgun being harder to purchase than a second box of Aleve Cold & Sinus. You may want unfettered access to the death machine of your choice, but you must admit it’s making America a dangerous place to live, and scarring an entire generation.
Not one word in that was factually accurate. How can we compromise when everything you say is wrong?
Your hobby has a death toll, and you must work with us to bring it down. You’ll lose something you want. So will I. That’s life. And then when we’ve done that and I can devote my energy to the Pointer Sisters thing, trust me—the choreography will be simple and accessible to even the beginning performer.
My hobby killed no one. Criminals killed people. Don’t confuse the two.
Literally everything but guns will be blamed.
What the fuck? The gun is a tool. A sicko has evil in his soul. The people tasked with protecting students fucked up. You still blame the tool and the people who made it and the law abiding people who like them.
You are the one blaming everything and everybody but the people responsible.
Violent video games and movies are the real culprit, even though the rest of the world plays and watches them. Moral decay is at fault, even though that’s subjective and not unique to America. It’s the shooter who killed people, not the gun, as though he would have racked up the same body count with a sack of oranges.
The video game argument died fast because it’s bullshit. Tipper Gore lost that shit back in the 90’s.
You want to talk about moral decay. We can talk about a lot. It seems to me like there is a correlation between the uptick in school shootings and kids being raised by single moms, a lack of attendance of church the destruction of the Boy Scouts or other institutions based on instructing young people in morality, and an attack on traditional male values such as character and responsibility as toxic. Then there is the media sensationalism of shooters and the culture of celebrity at any cost.
You fuckers did that.
So to that end: let me point out that one hundred percent of mass shootings involve guns. Literally all of them. None of them don’t.
But not 100% of killings. You just don’t care about those.
The one argument along these lines that I find halfway compelling is this one: mass shootings are a mental health issue. That’s not wrong, and the kernel of truth within it lies in the way it was expressed to me more times than I care to count: “It’s a mental health issue, faggot!”
We do expect our boys to keep their emotions close to the vest. We do teach our boys to be aggressive. We do tell them that vulnerability or sadness or loneliness or longing are things that must be hidden from view, otherwise they are women or homosexuals. We do say “Man up,” which has forever meant “don’t feel anything in public.”
Maybe if we eased up on that a little bit, maybe if these young men could express their emotions in healthy ways in safe environments, these stories might not end so tragically. Maybe if asking for help didn’t get boys mocked and diminished, they might do it more and reach for the all-too-available guns less. (Also, while we’re on the subject, if you think you’re insulting a gay man by calling him a gay man, you are a) not, and b) revealing so much about yourself you really would not believe it.)
Mostly though, I will concede that there is a mental health element to this problem for one simple reason: If you think the status quo is in any way defensible, you are out of your fucking mind.
Oh great, another person who confuses manliness with shitty pop culture. It’s not “don’t express your emotions” it’s “do the responsible thing first.” I’ve written about this before. Read that.
The simple desire to make your country safer will be seen as a far-left viewpoint.
Fixed it for you: “The simple desire to make your country safer by collectively punishing the innocent is a far-left viewpoint.”
I wrote my piece to illustrate how a true moderate—in the face of a terrible and worsening problem—begins to think like an extremist. I have no desire to be an extremist. I think it’s a childish way to move through the world.
No you admit you weren’t a moderate. Good introspection.
I would love to meet in the middle. I would love for law-abiding gun owners to have access to the thing that brings them joy and gives them a sense of safety. I would also love for fewer children to get their heads shot off. So it really falls to the vast majority of gun owners who don’t belong to the NRA or support their agenda. To them I say: Where you at? We need you to get out here and start pushing. Otherwise it’ll just be the NRA on one side, and on the other, regular folks like me who actually do, with each new near-daily atrocity, become extremists and gun-grabbers.
You are a lying sack of shit. You were honest when you said you wanted to take our guns and kill us. Now you are all butthurt and back peddling because we stood up to you.
You want to protect kids. Great. Taking my guns won’t do fuck all to stop that.
The kids who are growing up under this dark cloud will be voting soon, and they are already actively not having it. So join us. I think the Pointer Sisters said it best: “Come on. Jump on in.”
And we’ll have to fight those tinpot dictators too.
You are not the victim here fucker. You were an internet tough guy writing in an echo chamber that you didn’t expect us to read and challenge you on.
You hate guns, you hate gun owners, and you hate everyone who disagrees with you.
As soon as we told you just how deep and how rough you can shove your opinion up your ass (hint, very deep and very rough), you had to play the victim.
You are a typical Left Wing Progressive.
I didn’t kill anybody at Parkland, or anywhere else for that matter. But because I own an AR you want to murder me and leave my children without a father.
My response to you is: fuck you, I dare you, come to my house and try it.
Why? Because you want to leave my children without a father because I have a different political opinion than you do.
There is no compromise on that position. It is not moderate.
I want to be left alone. I want to protect schools. Those are not incompatible.
How about when a kid tosses out red flag we do something other than reward his bad behavior. How about we put in place anti-bully measures that are effective. How about we employ meaningful security procedures in schools.
Anything but “take the guns from the NRA’s cold dead hands.”
But you can’t do that. It’s never the fault of your blessed government bureaucracy. It has to be our fault as law abiding gun owners.
No it’s not. You can take that attitude and fuck off with it.
And if you really do try and take my guns, you’ll get them bullets first you keyboard commando cocksucker.
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