If there’s anything I’ve seen since Sandy Hook that says “We care WAY more about our guns than we do the lives of innocent children,” it was yesterday’s Gun Appreciation Day. From what I could see, the rallies around the country represented the attempt by a self-righteous majority to convince themselves that they’re oppressed and their inalienable God-given rights are under siege. It was as comical as it was thoroughly unnecessary and disrespectful…not that gun nuts typically care for anything you can’t load and fire.
As I listened to a succession of gun nuts bleat about their freedom and their rights, I couldn’t help but wonder how they could square those rights and freedoms with the slaughter of innocent children. Are children (or other innocent civilians) merely abstract concepts because the gun nuts don’t know any of them? Is the occasional slaughter to be considered merely a cost of doing business in order to protect their precious guns? Or are there really so many people who’d feel emasculated without their guns?
Look, y’all…as much as I might like to, no one is talking about taking your guns. The debate is centered around how to prevent massacres like Sandy Hook from happening, yet you’re so concerned with your precious guns that you refuse to entertain anything you might be able to propagandize as a “gun grab.”
Despite the protestations of gun nuts, the 2nd Amendment isn’t immutable, unalterable, OR sacrosanct. It’s 26 words promulgated by people who couldn’t possibly have foreseen the shooting gallery this country has evolved into. We should be able to have a reasoned, rational conversation about the role of guns in our society, but with gun nuts playing the oppression card and screaming about how the 2nd Amendment was ordained by God, there’s no way for that to happen.
A lot of people who keep a gun at home for safety are the same ones who refuse to wear a seat belt.
- George Carlin
Gun Appreciation Day was a wholly pointless, sick, and hypocritical exercise conducted by a class of people who elevate their rights over anything and everything else. Evidently, they’re willing to accept the occasional massacre of innocents as the price to be paid for their freedoms. Of course, it’s easy to feel that way when you don’t know the people doing the dying.
It would be nice if the gun nuts could at least be honest. It’s not about freedom, it’s not about protecting the constitution, and it’s not about resisting a tyrannical government. It’s about a collection of angry, self-absorbed, and self-important zealots who believe that the interests of the individual far outweigh the collective common good. They’re the same people who make the Tea Party possible, and it’s about time they realized that they’ve devolved into an embarrassing exercise in self-parody.
It’s not all about the individual, nor should it be. It’s about America. It’s about making America safer for our children and reducing the likelihood of massacres like Sandy Hook. Unfortunately, the gun nuts seem to care for nothing save their own narrow, self-absorbed agenda. And that represents much of what is wrong with America today.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
