Nurse the Hate: Here Comes The Gun Lobby

The bluster talk about sensible gun control has launched again.  It will be dead in the water by Monday, but today it still has some life.  That stiff Paul Ryan actually went out onto a podium yesterday and said it was “too soon” to talk about guns.  He should have been wearing an NRA hat while he did it just so those in the population that are completely asleep could have at least had a chance to make the connection.  Paul Ryan is the emptiest of all empty suits.  He is the guy that takes the last slice of pizza.  He is the one that raises his hand to remind the teacher to assign weekend homework as he thinks it will get him brownie points.  He’s a guy that thinks “French Vanilla” is too rich an ice cream flavor, so he sticks to “vanilla” thank you very much.  He will eat any shit sandwich put in front of him if he thinks he will benefit long term.  He is the guy you hated in elementary school, high school, and college that turned out just like you thought he would.  He is perhaps the last person you would ever want to go on a road trip with to any destination associated with fun.  He is, the worst.

Ryan and Rubio and the other paid for politicians that are strangling common sense will attempt to move the argument away from the obvious “these fucking guns are out of control” to “it’s a mental health issue”.  This suggests that it would be easier to monitor the mental state of everyone in the nation instead of just making sure no one has military style weapons at their disposal.  Let’s say we took Paul Ryan and put him in a room with Charles Manson and a AR-15.  Would Paul Ryan be concerned with A) getting Charles mental health counseling or B) getting that goddamn AR-15 out of the room?  The correct answer is C) checking with the NRA to make sure what they want him to do. 

It’s a lot like the cigarette companies in the 1970s and 80s.  When the obvious conclusion that smoking made you sick and killed you was made, opinion began to sway towards holding the companies responsible for knowingly killing their customers.  The cigarette companies had an effective strategy of sidetracking arguments into minutiae and delivering truckloads of money to Congress to stall any legislation that would hurt their bottom line.  The gun companies know they are going to lose this battle eventually.  At some point Congress will run the risk/benefit math and discover that they could lose their cushy office jobs by protecting the gun companies.  I don’t know when that point is as The American People forgot about a dude with a machine gun opening up on a Country Music Festival within a week.  What’s left after that?  Spraying gunfire at a toddler’s playground?  Murdering an entire stadium of people at an NBA game?  It’s tough to keep people’s attention.  They’d probably have to get LeBron.  “LeBron James Tragically Murdered in Mass Shooting at NBA Finals… 19,999 others also killed”

The gun people trot out their idiotic talking points.  “You need a good guy with a gun to take out a bad guy with a gun” (13,000+ annual gun murders in the country versus 11 documented cases of “good guy with a gun” doing anything EVER=complete fallacy).  “People can use a baseball bat to kill people, so getting rid of guns doesn’t solve the problem” (Um, yeah but a guy with a baseball bat can’t kill 17 people and injure 20 more in a few minutes like he can with a fucking machine gun)  “Drunk drivers kill more people with guns, but you wouldn’t outlaw cars” (Yes but cars aren’t specifically designed to kill people, so there’s that)

The Gun People are completely inflexible.  They are different than “people that own guns but have a sense of reason”.  The Gun People spend too much time watching Pravda TV, listening to Rush Limbaugh, and think Alex Jones has sensible things to say about the dreaded “Deep State”.  They will not, under any circumstances, agree to talk about a sensible solution to regular mass murders.  They have been told over and over again that to give an inch is to lose the war.  It’s a tough way to live in a society that is built on majority rule and consensus building, but there it is.  They will never enter into a discussion that is empathetic to the vast majority of us that aren’t living in the delusion that we are action heroes and do not want to be gunned down for no particular reason.  They don’t care and you can’t teach someone empathy. 

The only way to get this changed is to make the Congress members that refuse to do anything so uncomfortable in their inaction that they are forced to do the right thing.  That shitbag Paul Ryan will change his tune with even the first whiff of public opinion threatening his gig.  In Ohio, Rob Portman has received $3 million+ from the NRA.  He has what can be called a certain “moral ambiguity” as anyone can attest after he made that whiplash change on gay rights when his son came out as gay.  He can be counted on to do the right thing if it benefits him personally.  I hope enough of the population can maintain the effort necessary to either change these representative’s behavior or remove them from office.  These people have no conscience so the key is to focus on what makes them tick.  Self interest.

Keep your heads down.