Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition)

 

Over at Nancy Nall's place the inevitable discussion about who gets to get shot down in the streets (grocery stores, rub-and-tug-shops...) because freedum!!! 

One of the commentors made the following remark:

“…let’s give the olde white guys credit in 1787: they’re thinking about muzzleloading black powder rifles…”

To which I replied that I think it’s even simpler than that; these guys were thinking with their wallets. And, to a great extent, their “republican” ideology. It wasn't the weapons. It was the fiscals and the politics.

The thing the gunsuckers always elide is the first section of that amendment: “A well-regulated militia…” The rich guys who wrote the foundational documents 1) were appalled at the expense of a standing army (and navy, which is insane when you think of how important maritime commerce was to the infant U.S., but, Jefferson, FFS…) and 2) were deeply committed to the idea that a standing army was a “danger to liberty”. All those soldiers with no citizen cred, just waiting for the demagogue to come along and coup with them? 

No way, Citizen Jose’!

So their idea was that the Good People of the country would flock to the standards when danger threatened and form “the nation in arms” (and keeping in mind that their model were the colonial militias, which largely kept their weapons (and almost all their propellant – the black powder) in a local “magazine” where it would be issued when that alarm was sounded).

So it wasn’t even the notion of every swinging richard running around with a military-grade firearm that would have bugged them. It was the notion that that firearm was for using on their fellow citizens for random whackadoodle reasons and that wasn’t a good reason to keep those firearms locked up in the magazines.

And let’s not EVEN go into the notion that they wanted every Joe and Molly to have a bang-stick to prevent “tyranny” coming from the new U.S. government, because the moment that happens Shay’s and the whiskey rebels will need a moment to whip the fuck up on your head.

Nope. The current firearms priapism is a symptom of the prion disease that has eaten the brains of waaaaayyyyy too many Americans, including nearly all “conservatives”.

 You'd think that at this point...

 But, no. I mean, Sandy Hook! Rando homicidal looney guns down adorable kiddies. That doesn't shake you? You insist it was a fake, or "crisis actors", or whatever?

The crazy has gone too deep, and there's no digging it out now. 

(And the title of this post comes from Jim Wright's series on this whole nonsense. They're archived here and are all worth a read, as is his "Bang Bang Sanity" essay that discusses some commonsense ideas that will help put a lid on this nonsense. 

Not that We the People will.)

Another day, another ammosexual "WTF"

So the SCOTUS has refused to hear an appeal from a couple of Kansas gunlickers who were caught with illegal suppressors.

From what I can tell, these gimmicks are the new throbbing erection for the sort of people who get huge wood from fondling firearms; in this case (I can only imagine) as part of the Seal Team Six fantasies cherished by these people, the ones where they are sneaking into the Terrorists' Hideout and eliminating the sentries with their silenced pistol or submachinegun.

While it's good that even the GOP nutbags on the court weren't willing to go all in on these Rainbow Six: Siege wannabes' suppressor fapping, the most revolting part of this court case is that the fucking State of Kansas, along with seven other states' AGs, joined in the appeal because it's obviously in the states' interests to have a bunch of fucking lunatic gunbunnies running around with silenced firearms because what the fuck.

The "explanation" I've heard for why these nimrods want to put cans on their metal dicks is because something something hearing protection something.

Okay. So. Word up.

I've been there and done that and shot the real noisemakers, the REALLY big guns, and I got your fucking hearing protection right here, chief:

Works just fine to protect your delicate, shell-like ears from the bad bang-bang, AND it doesn't help you sneak up and kill random people without alerting the OTHER random people you want to kill that you're killing random people on your way to kill them.

Just sayin'.

Honestly.

These fucking people.

More fucking thoughts and prayers

I see it's time to drag this one out.

Again.

I know this has nothing to do with the results of the 2016 elections, yet I look around and what I see is just a part of the toxic stew of the very worst of my country that seems to be bubbling cheerfully on every stovetop; arrogant, corrupt, ignorant, splenetic...it makes me think of the piece of Robert Graves' I, Claudius where the cunningly-not-really-a-gimping-halfwit emperor turns his appalling heir loose on Rome, whispering "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."

What hits me hardest about these nutter shootings is how they never change anything because of the magical incantation "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" as if the whole "well-regulated militia" thing was a fantasy and the U.S. Constitution is some sort of Holy Writ, handed down on gold tablets never to be altered or re-imagined.

Well, the Constitution once said that black people were 3/5ths of a registered voter, and that it was illegal to drink a beer.

Both of those ideas were fucked up. So We the People changed the Constitution.

So far, the score of the Second Amendment is "resisting tyrannical government", zero; "butchering other Americans", about a gajillion. I note that all these ammosexuals with their arsenals seem curiously mute about "tyranny" like the idea that the government can freely spy on our communications, or take our stuff if we get arrested - not convicted, mind you, just arrested - for smoking weed. So I conclude that the notion that the "right to keep and bear arms" has pretty much zero percent to do with the sort of people doing actual tyranny-resisting and 100% to do with the sort of fucking people who get a woody out of busting out more than thirty rounds a minute.

But who gives an actual fuck?

Nobody is going to do anything about this. Tomorrow another nutter will take another semiautomatic weapon into another school and another N > 0 number of kiddies and teachers and random poor sonsofbitches will die or be hideously wounded. And we'll hear that there's nothing we can do - in the only industrialized nation that this happens regularly - and we need to have more mental health care (but fuck-all funding for it), and we need to send our thoughts and prayers to the new set of grieving parents and lovers and brothers and sisters whose beloveds have been blown away so I can go to the range tomorrow and bust out 200 rounds of 5.56mm in fifteen minutes.

So, fuck it.

Here's a fucking cute picture of a cute fucking cat.