Bang Bang Crazy: Supreme Court Conclusion

 

On Thursday, June 23, 2022, six of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States wrote the conclusion to my little thread about the butchery that took place inside an elementary school in Texas almost exactly a month earlier.

And that conclusion was: we're wingnuts and we love guns, so fuck you.

It's really just that simple.

The modern "conservative" movement loves them some guns. Big guns, little guns, old guns, new guns...guns are what gives them wood. There is no firearm that the current SCOTUS majority considers too risky, too dangerous, too lethal, for some mouth-breathing peckerhead to carry around the public square.

Why? Because there's a good reason for mouth-breathing peckerheads to stroll about armed like a Nung mercenary?

Fuck, no.

It's because ammosexuals - people who get their rocks off having badass weaponry - are a crucial voting element of the Republican criminal conspiracy.

Without the gun-humpers, the racists, the incels, the bible-bangers, no Republican would ever get elected. Ever. Again.

So this is them throwing brains to their zombie horde.

There is no other reason.

They give fuck-all about the people who are going to die, who are going to live miserable lives with the damage the bullet will do to their arms or legs or guts (have you ever seen a gunshot wound? Unless it's from a peashooter .22 it's not a nice neat little hole. High-velocity ammunition shreds human meat and splinters bone. It commonly leaves you crippled and in pain for the rest of your life) or the grief of loss and rage at the insult to minds, lives, and bodies those firearms and the mouth-breathing peckerheads who will soon be humping them everywhere will do.

And don't even get me started on how the already-twitchy trigger fingers of the cowardly cops will get an order of magnitude twitchier.

Adam Serwer has a terrific article up in The Atlantic that explains that this isn't some sort of "conservative" bug. It's a feature:

"The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whatever stances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undead constitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along."

 Which, of course, leads us to the past week's Dobbs v Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade.

Wingnut assurances to the contrary, people have been purging their spawn since there were people. The difference that Roe made was that the person outside the spawn was likely to survive. 

But, like the Bruen decision was not intended to make civil society safer, saner, more reasonable and more attractive for everyone but to give the Republican gun-humping faction a chubby, Dobbs isn't actually intended to make things more sane and sensible for actual human beings but to make the fundamentalist freaks that are one of the other important parts of the GOP base cum their brains out.

That's it.

That's all.

That's the entire reason these black-robed fuckers are tearing out everything built since 1929 they can lay their grabby little dickbeaters on.

Look up "nondelegation" if you really want to get a shiver of existential terror.

That's where these fucksticks are going. 1929? Just a pit stop on the way to 1879.

As I said back in May; these people are coming for us.

Any of us who aren't like them.

They're coming with force and fear.

Serwer sums it up neatly:

"The core conservative belief about the culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This, not historical research, not legal analysis, is the prime means of constitutional interpretation for its current majority. (T)he right-wing justices’ vow that other constitutional rights are safe for precisely what it is worth—which is to say, absolutely nothing."

This is what they want for you:

It's from The Onion, but don't kid yourself.

It's only as funny as long as they haven't actually done it.

All these nice people? The church lady, the gruff-but-loveable old cuss down at the VFW, the nice missionary who handed you the tract the other day, the respectable attorney who's the chairman of the local Kiwanis?

They're your deadly fucking enemies and want you powerless and crushed.

So.

It's really simple:

Fight them.

Fight them or be destroyed.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition - Uvalde, Part 2)

 

Just look at 'em. 

The Uvalde, Texas Police Department Special Weapons and Tactics Team.

Pretty badass, aren't they? All dress-right-dress-and-covered-down, got their GI on, tac boots and blue fatigues, locked-n-loaded and ready to protect and serve, right?

Except they didn't.

When an angry but untrained young man with a similar weapon turned up to kill a bunch of the kiddies their P.R. claimed were the reason for their existence, these heroes stood around with their thumbs up their collective ass for an hour or so letting the dude wax those kids.

What you and I and every other American needs to get is that this was a feature, not a bug.

Think about who those coppers actually work for.

You? Me? Those kids or their parents?

C'mon. Pull the other one. That's enough to make a cat laugh.

The Uvalde cops work for "the City of Uvalde" just like the Portland Police Bureau works for the "City of Portland". 

When was the last time your city or town did something because you wanted or needed it?

That's not to say that the people who the cops do work for - the federal, state, county, or city governments and those who have outsized influence on them such as wealthy donors or corporations or political action groups - don't do things that help work for you.

But they don't do it for you.

And neither do the cops.

Instead, given the way most police in the United States have been infected with Soldier-Cop Disease, it's more likely that these rascals look at you and me as nuisances at best and enemies at worst. We're not why they do their job; we're a problem that has to be solved for them to do what they see as their job. We're the randos in Nisour Square that scare the shit out of them, that put them on edge and make them reach for their weapons.

Now.

I have a tiny amount of sympathy for the coppers, given the immense number of firearms wandering around the U.S. public. It's kinda hard to avoid being paranoid and trigger-happy when any rando could be a whackaloon with a hogleg and a hard-on for killing someone.

Not that they usually kill coppers, mind. That's hard and risky; it's a lot more fun and easy to kill kids or shoppers or folks in church or massage parlors.

But my sympathy is hammered pretty flat by the hard cold facts that those coppers will willingly shoot your or me but are unwilling to risk going in hard on some whackaloon with a black rifle.

Frankly, it's time and past time for We the People to get over the ridiculous tongue-bathing we give our coppers.

I get it; we've had years and years of copaganda, going all the way back to the old Dragnet- and The FBI-style TV shows, telling us that these jokers are the Thin Blue Line between us and anarchy.

But think about it.

Coppers don't "prevent" crimes.

Unless the copper is literally standing right there, the cop has no way to "prevent" crime. Or anything else, when you stop and think about it, from a riot to a hobo taking a dump on your lawn.

Portland has a whopping 0.0012 sworn officers - actual cops - per person. How the ever loving fuck is one-thousandth of a cop going to stop me from whipping up on your head. Like I said two years ago; what maintains our civil society isn't some thin fucking blue line. It's us, you and me, being good citizens and good neighbors.

Coppers don't "solve" crimes, either.

I'm old enough to remember Sergeant Friday locking up all the baddies every week. Crime didn't pay, at least not on TV.

In real life?

The cops barely clear half of all murder cases. Here in Portland? It's less than half.

And that's THE big crime, felony murder. Figure out for yourself how the Blue Line does with stuff like robbery, rape, or burglary.

Yeah, like that.

So what do these tax-fattened fucksticks do?

Largely exactly what their owners - the governments and wealthy government-influencers - want them to do; keep the canaille in line, show the flag so the plebs see who's in charge, do the minimum to intimidate the normies from misbehaving and to ensure that there's no visible opportunity to break loose and run wild.

I'm not against that, exactly. That's what We the People seem to be fine with, and, besides, someone has to roust the smelly crazy homeless people off the Safeway parking lot and it's sure as Hell not gonna be me.

But there's no reason to valorize or even defer to the people we pay to do that sort of stuff.

It's not like they're going to charge a looney murderer with a rifle for us, right?

No.

The coppers won't save us from these lunatic killers and their semiauto hard-ons.

Next time, let's discuss what, if anything, is possible.

Some ruminations on nutter shootings

Look, people. Death is all around you. We're BORN owing God - or Nature, or whatever - a death. As my old drill sergeant used to say, the single most fucked up thing about Life is that NOBODY gets out of it alive.

If you're going to get all freaky worrying about your safety or groveling on your knees begging God to save you because anti-abortion propaganda drove some loony to shoot up medical clinics, or because some asshole with a religious mania, or a nasty personality, shot up his workplace's Christmas party you're worrying about the wrong thing.

An e. coli bug, or a drunk driver, or that third goddamn Hostess Ho-ho you just ate is gonna kill you long before some Islamic nut or some rightwing manic.

So...you could get all freaky about what seems like a mad orgy of death and destruction and the end of times and OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!

Or. You can listen to an old Army sergeant.

You're gonna die. Yep. Some day you're dead meat. Pinin' for the fjords. Ceased to be. Expired.

But.

Until then every day you live you are a gift of love.

So hug your children. Drink something strange, and adventurous. Sit out under the stars and watch the universe wheel overhead. Hold someone dear to you very, very close and still, so still that all you can hear is your heartbeat and theirs. Kiss their skin softly, sweetly, and inhale their scent and stop and remember; every day you live you are a gift of love.

Someday you will die.

But not today.

Bearing Arms

The Newton Massacre has brought all the usual rhetorical suspects to our discussions on this subject over at MilPub and my friends' Jim and Lisa's blog Ranger Against War.

I've said quite a bit on the subject of the "right to keep and bear arms" against the right to not have some armed sonofabitch busting caps at you for no good reason at both places. But I wanted to take a moment here to clarify my position on this whole business.

There seems to be two main veins of argument against any sort of tightened regulation of firearms. Boiled down to their bones, they are 1) humans are awful and will do terrible things, so there's no point in trying to use firearms regulations to do anything about that, and 2) the "right to bear arms" is sacred and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and any attempt to mess with said right is to commit grievous harm to the liberties of American citizens.

Before I move on to my own points let me address both of these, which I consider largely canards and excuses not to do something that the speakers find either inconvenient to themselves or intellectual distasteful rather than actually critical to the issue of reducing the toll of dead Americans.

Regarding the first point, yes; humans are fucking awful. They are also miraculous, delightful, irritating, ridiculous, and bizarre. Man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards says the narrator in the Book of Job and what was true for the Hebrews of the Old Testament is certainly true today.

This human tendency towards fucktardry is one of the reasons that human societies devised things like laws and rules in the first place. We know that people will cheat each other if possible, so we institute things like certified weights and measures so that your butcher will not short-weight your beefsteak or financial regulations so that your bankster will not steal from your 401K. We know that people will rape other people, will drive too fast and do all sorts of other nasty, irritating business if not constrained by rules.

So it seems at best rather louche to pretend that this human bastardy is a reason against, rather than for, devising ways to decrease the mechanical advantage of firearms provided to people in general. I may feel perfectly capable of driving 120 in the interstate - and I may well BE capable of doing just that - but to allow that the state of Oregon would have to allow that fucking idiot in Clackastan driving the clapped-out beater of a Chevy K-car. That's a good reason for keeping the speed limit down to 65; the lower, the safer for all of us.

As for the second, well, the "right to bear arms" is only a part of the phrase "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." To understand this phrase is to delve into the minds of the Framers and understand the conditions of the United States at the time of this writing.

The men who wrote the Bill of Rights had had their belliesfull of goddamn regular soldiers. The British government had taxed the colonies to pay for the troops that had fought the French and Indian War and had forced the colonial gentlemen to house and feed those regular troops - you'll notice that the Bill of Rights contains another entire Amendment, the Third, that prohibits "quartering" of troops by fiat - and then used those regulars to try and suppress the colonists when they rebelled. So the idea of a standing force of regulars was a hissing and a byword amongst the lead men of this new nation.

The notion was that the United States would be defended by a hardy force of volunteer militamen arising from the armed populace; tens of thousands of Cincinnati rallying to the Colors when the nation was in danger, bearing the arms that they kept. This way the nation would be both free of the danger of Praetorian treason and the expense of paying for arms and equipment of a standing army - a win-win for the impoverished country!

So the Second Amendment is directed specifically at "providing for the common defense". The arms that the People are not to be infringed from keeping and bearing were for the security of the free state; target shooting for pleasure, home defense, fighting off the zombie apocalypse?

Not so much.

So; can we agree that, first, humans are shit and that's a reason FOR, not against, letting them have all the rounds they can shoot and, second, that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution does NOT provide for unlimited private firearms possession but, rather, for the provision of an armed civilian military reserve with the implicit authority of the federal government to determine the nature of that armament in the same way it arms the regular military forces?

Well. Whether or not you agree I will continue.

So here's what I believe on this subject, and let me state for the record that this will be my final post on the subject; I will try and fully expound on what I believe here so we will not have reason to further address this here.

1. I don't think that there is ANY way to prevent people from killing other people. Homo homini lupus said Plautus in 195BC; "Man is a wolf to man". We are killers; with our native American genocide and the way we've applied - and are applying - our devastating military power overseas the United States certainly qualifies as one of the great killers of history. As individuals and collectively we have killed, and certainly will kill, our thousands and tens of thousands.

That, in my opinion, makes it a reason for, not argues against, making it more difficult for us to kill each other.

2. I believe that there are steps we should take on the social and medical fronts to make these massacres more difficult and less frequent. It should be simpler for troubled people to get serious mental health treatment. It should be simpler for people who know people who are troubled to get those people referred to treatment, and simpler for people who fall into the legal system and show signs of genuine mental trouble that looks dangerous to get treatment.

This will not prevent these nutter-shootings, but it might help.

3. But I also believe that we can take steps to prevent private individuals from turning up heavily armed in public spaces.

- Nobody needs to fire more than six rounds without reloading. Period. If you are a hunter and you cannot drop your buck in six rounds you are a sorry excuse for a hunter AND a menace to both wildlife and your fellow hunters.

This is a simple solution; starting tomorrow every magazine will be manufactured with a fixed six-round cutoff, and a program established to buy-back all unaltered magazines. Possession of an unaltered magazine will be a Class C felony punishable by a ginormous fine.

- Close the "gun-show" loophole, and stiffen background checks. Prohibit sales of firearms, ammunition, and magazines over the Internet. Period.

- If you purchase a firearm you will be required to purchase a locking safety device such as a gun safe and a trigger lock and required to use it when not actively firing.

- Purchase of a firearm will require successful completion of 8 hours of firearms training, to include safe storage, handling, and operation of your firearms, to include a practical exercise. If you cannot or will not successfully complete this training you cannot possess a firearm. This includes every individual who buys a new firearm. You say you're a fucking expert and know every facet and quirk of your weapon? Too fucking bad; age and knowledge are no guarantee that you won't walk around doing stupid shit like keeping a round under the hammer.

I would consider these a minimum.

I don't pretend that these measures will end nutter shootings. NOTHING will end the human delight in destroying other humans. But it will make it harder for the nutters.

The simple fact is that killing people with firearms is simple. A child can do it, and children have. And firearms that produce volumes of fire make this simplicity even simpler. Forcing the nutters to reload once or twice would at least give their victims a chance to escape, or to tackle the nutter.

I don't consider these regulations "infringing" on people's "rights". Financial regulations don't "infringe" on banker's rights to make bank and speed limits don't "infringe" on your right to drive. But they do put some sensible limits on the abilities of skeevy bastards to endanger your bank account and your car insurance premium and as such constitute a fairly sensible approach to limiting risk while still allowing human commerce and travel.

You could still "keep" and "bear" your arms. You'd just have to do it in a way that insures a bit more domestic tranquility and provides a touch more public safety.

And...in case you think I'm being drastic, you have no idea.

Frankly, I think that young American males are waaaaayyyy too groiny about autoloading weaponry and waaaayyyy to casual about the horrors of war. With the end of the draft there are far too many young men whose sole experience with soldiering and warfare is through the ridiculous lens of Call of Duty Black: Ops or some such video crap. As a society we have far too little understanding of the ugly realities of what weapons do and mean. I think that has a lot to do with the casual way we treat the secret wars we are fighting in Asia right now; we have no skin in the game.

If I had my way I'd draft every goddamn mother's son for a sixteen-week basic military training. And this would be as nasty as I could make it; grim, spartan, physically painful and stressful. The guys would fire and clean their weapons repeatedly under the nastiest conditions, fire them until they were sick of the sight of them, clean them until they hated the smell of Break-free. They would live in the mud and the cold, eat cold rations, and march until their legs came off. They would get as close to the worst conditions of soldiering that I could make them.

Because that was what cured me.

I went into the service like most other green kids, thinking that it would be cool to be the Lord of War. But spending hours with a green plastic issue toothbrush and a black bottle of Breakfree grinding carbon off the bolt after more hours hunkered down in a concrete culvert staring at plastic Russians in the misting rain and cursing the forward assist knocked the magic and the mystery out of semiautomatic fire.

Knowing how to handle a rifle safely and accurately is a skill, and one (in my estimation) worth knowing. But the grim reality that comes with that skill, and is implied every time you squeeze the trigger, is even more worth knowing, and I would gleefully beat that knowledge into the fat head of every wannabe Rambo that came through my BT company. I came by it the hard way. I would be happy to provide that wisdom free of the charge in blood and death.

And then...I'd send them on to two years of National Service.

Those who chose could go on to the uniformed services. The others could pick a sort of Civilian Conservation Corps, doing pick-and-shovel work on infrastructure projects, or a VISTA/Peace Corps sort of national or international assistance doing anything from teaching kids to read to drilling wells to deworming goats.

After two years of this hopefully that would return to American life a bit more experienced in the world, and a bit less eager to barge about knocking things over. Plus a bit more knowledgeable about the sort of other people out there, the ones that many young men never know about other than through the television news, as fables and nonsense, or...through the sights of a rifle.

But that's just my wild notion.

On the subject of firearms I have no hope that any of my ideas will get past the idle discussion stage. Whilst we have gleefully pissed away so many of our rights in the current nonsensical wars against "terror" and "drugs" we find a critical minority of our fellow citizens unwilling to even consider a check on our "right" to bear any sort and any number of firearms.

We torture and even kill our helpless prisoners, hide them in secret without even admitting their names, we consider secret snooping and spying normal and natural. We lionize those who send out our soldiers to invade nations that have no injured us while we prosecute those who reveal the crimes of those we have celebrated. We have given up huge portions of our rights to speedy and public trials, to freedom from imprisonment without due process of law, to a free press and free speech.

And yet, on the question of restricting the "right" of a lunatic to shoot more than six rounds at a go we are adamant; this shall not pass!

What the fuck are we thinking?

Update 12/23 p.m.: And just because people who are smarter and funnier than you are should always receive their due, I refer you to the blog Goblinbooks for the most incisive and funniest takedowns of the whole firearms-as-the-guarantee-of-liberty horsepuckey. Good stuff and you can say I said so.

Update 12/25: And here's Badtux the Firearms Penguin with a rather brilliant explanation of why removing the sort of handguns and rifles used in the Newton Massacre (and many of the other nutter-shootings) would have a vastly minimal effect on private possession and use of firearms. I have no doubt that this will have zero effect on the sort of person whose masturbatory fantasies "need" two or more AR-15 knockoffs. But I sure as hell wish that Congress would read it.

American Skin

In case you're wondering what prompted the violent posts of the past several days, this is my daughter's classroom Friday, the very same day that a nutter took his Bushmaster .223 to a school very like it, and a classroom very like it, and killed children and teachers very like the ones you are seeing.

Now speaking generally I have never understood the "need" for anyone to own one of these military-style weapons. Frankly, an old-school Ruger 10/22 would seem perfectly capable of killing as many first-graders as you need to feed your sickness and has the added feature of being terrific for hunting squirrels when society collapses in the wake of the Zombie Apocalypse.

And I've never understood the idea that you can't legislate the type and number of arms that We the People can bear. How many fuckin' GI Joe look-alike Bushmaster .223's do you need? Christ, one is too many. The fuckin' deer and squirrels have yet to shoot back. And cricket bats and Winchesters work just fine on the zombies; you've seen Shaun of the Dead, right? What, a bolt-action Mauser isn't cool enough for ya?

But far beyond and above all the bloviating, this is what matters to me. She is half of my skin in the game.

If she, and millions like her, can be 0.001% less likely to capped by some nutter with a bad attitude and an autoloading rifle by the hard graft of separating the two then to me the benefit is worth the cost. Mental health? Don't make me laugh. I'm an old sergeant, and I do simple, easy, and certain. I know with dead solid surety that it's simpler, easier, and more certain to take the weapon out of the hands of the asshole nutter than take the nutter out of asshole nutter with Prozac and a couch.

I don't pretend to have an unbiased opinion on the subject. If you're coming here for that you are in the wrong place. On this subject I am in full-rant mode.

I am tired of the lies about tyranny prevented and the evasion of real death and maiming done to innocents. I am tired of people with vested interests in weapons lying about how regulation equals confiscation. I am tired of the endless blaming of the nutters and not the admission of how much more difficult it would be for them to indulge their murderous nuttery if they had to do it with a kitchen knife.

But to me what is the most important thing is that these children, that MY child, benefit from increasing the chance that the next nutter won't be able to lay his hands on a Bushmaster .223 before he walks through the door of this classroom.

If this be tyranny, I will make the most of it.

Requiem for Kindergartners

Away with us, he's going,
The solemn-eyed;
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hill-side.
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast;
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the woods and waters wild,
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than
he can understand.

~ W.B. Yeats, The Stolen Child

I really cannot speak further on this subject.

On the madness of mixing madness and autoloading weaponry I cannot convince anyone who cannot be convinced by dead children.

Mr. Yeats has said it already, and better than I ever will.

This Pretty Much Sums Up The "Gun Control Debate"

Wherein I am prescient.

Two days ago I wrote this:

"Then we really need to start accepting that so long as we're going to be okay with widespread private firearms that these occasional nutter-shootings are just going to happen. They are. And nothing short of a violent change in the way American society and public law works will change that. This is the thing about firearms; they're fucking easy. They're simple to work, especially modern military-style firearms which are designed to be used by deadhead draftees and Somali teenagers. They're quick to debug if they malfunction. And they're easy to use; just point at the nearest toddler and shoot.

It takes some strength, some determination, and some damn deadly difficult-to-learn homicide skills to kill someone with a nunchuck. Or a pickaxe. Or a bread knife.

But an AR-15?

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy, as the little ponies say."

And sure enough, like a deadly Fairie Queen in a pantomime, comes another.

I cannot really add to what I said at the end of the comments for the earlier nutter-shooting: "There will not be any change in the nutter-shooting situation until some advocacy group - "Mothers Against Autoloading Weapons" ("Maaw" or some damn thing) - begins doing what MADD did for drunk driving and jams the 2nd Amendment sideways up the NRA's ass.

Period."

But, honestly? I'm betting you that this will be off the heavy-rotation news cycle by NEXT Friday and forgotten by next week.

Sigh. Fuckin' people...