I see your silver-haired all-American head, like a composite picture of every Republican ever being worn as a mask by a failed Baldwin brother. It’s action time again, isn’t it, Kevin McCarthy? Time to go on Fox News and spread the message. You’ve bagged yourselves a twofer of gun violence, with El Paso throwing Trump’s rhetoric under the spotlight. Time to shove all that NRA money up a goat’s bumhole and cast it out into the desert before the electorate can Google ‘stochastic terrorism.’
This latest episode in the longest running and most depressing American drama of all time has thrown up some of the most appalling political game-playing yet. Trump managed to find an orphaned baby to pose like an unrepentant ghoul with, displaying his severe allergy to basic empathy for all to see. The right-leaning press are rushing to paint the Dayton shooter as Antifa’s first mass murderer, pointing out his anti-Nazi rhetoric and single-tweet support for Elizabeth Warren. The false equivalency is as strained as it is obfuscatory; even if it turns out the Dayton shooter was politically motivated, two wrongs don’t justify a far right. If both sides are as abhorrent as Trump insists, we should be seeing Ted Cruz clamp down on white nationalist groups just as hard as he’s now gunning for Antifa any day now. He won’t, though – his spine has been so efficiently removed that it could make a Predator jealous.
So that leaves you, Kevin McCarthy, yet another political mouthpiece for a gun lobby so drenched in American blood that it looks like it stood outside the elevator in The Overlook Hotel as the doors opened. And what a fall guy you’ve found already.
Once again, the uniquely American epidemic of random gun violence becomes the fault of a combination of video games and mental health. Rather than contemplate the absurd notion of perhaps maybe doing just a little teeny tiny teensy bit of something about all the guns and hate speech, the party of deregulation and free expression turns its sights instead on regulating Mario Kart. Frankly it’s absurd that it’s taken this long – it feels like only yesterday we were reeling after the Pong Massacres of 1972, and who can forget all those who died in the Tetris Incident of 1984?
It’s disingenuous nonsense, naturally, shown up as such by the briefest glance at statistics that show no correlation whatsoever between video games and gun violence. It’s nothing more than distraction tactics, followed inevitably by the same nonsensical arguments about good guys with guns and the need for the people to protect themselves from the tyranny of the state. When does that one come into play, exactly? We’re currently looking at an American administration so transparently corrupt that it may as well be a glass terrarium in which Richard Nixon is perpetually masturbating into a rolled-up Bill of Rights. The state’s tyranny is on display for all to see, and all the home-owned firearms in the country haven’t got a hope in hell of doing a thing about it.
The rest of the world is never going to understand the uniquely American obsession with firearms, due in no small part to its inherent dishonesty. Frankly chaps, if you just said “look, we think guns are cool, and we love them enough to not care that they kill thousands of people every year” we’d probably have more respect for you. We get it. Some of us think they’re cool too.
It’s just that we had our mass shootings and we’d rather not repeat them. We’d rather have a firmer grip on just how many lethal weapons are in the hands of criminals and terrorists. We’d rather not need to sell bullet-proof school bags and drill our children on how to survive active shooter events. We’d rather not have to rely on a completely militarised police force, who as a matter of personal safety rely on lethal force far more than they should have to as a result of the likelihood of facing a deadly threat. We’d rather not make it the easiest physical process imaginable to kill yourself, thus saving thousands of lives from preventable suicides every year. Oh, and we’d rather not have our toddlers shoot us in the back as we’re driving because they found a handgun in our purse.
We get it, too. It’s a totally different culture and some of you are hunters. But hear me out – has it occurred to you that if you need to fire enough bullets to kill nine people and injure 27 more over the course of 30 seconds just to take down one deer, you might not be very good at it?
Yes, some of us agree that guns are cool. But do you know what we do instead of going out and buying one? We pick up Call of Duty, because that’s the closest thing available in Tesco, and we go home and get the fuck over ourselves and our whiny, entitled need to own a lethal weapon just because it makes us feel big and powerful.
Your ‘tyranny of the state’ is here and in full force, Kevin McCarthy, and it’s a tyranny born of a gun culture that refuses to take responsibility for its actions. Money speaks louder than American lives when Mitch McConnell sits on gun control legislation with overwhelming public support and puppets like you make excuses for the lobbyists.
Nothing will change, Kevin McCarthy. For a bit, you and politicians like you will be yellow and cowering, chased by the ghosts of those killed around a never-ending maze of bad faith arguments. Then enough time will pass, you’ll pick up enough NRA backhanders and powerups and for a bit, the tables will turn. The ghosts will cease to matter, because things have calmed down and there’s money to be made.
Before it all happens again, Kevin McCarthy, because not one of you has the courage to stand up and walk away from the damned machine.
I see you, Kevin McCarthy. I fucking see you.
