I had to step back and think about it for a minute.

Because this time it was perfect.

A hate crime.

Terrorism.

Some product of deplorable southern genetic fuckery succumbs to calculated indoctrination, walks into an iconic black church and sits through a service for like an hour with the unsuspecting he intends to murder.  He quietly allows his rage to detonate and blows holes in people he doesn’t know at all but hates with the incandescence of racial animus.  He believes the full throttle afterburner of lies forced down his neck at the optimum time for his aptitude to gulp them.

He was about fourteen years old when Barack Obama was first elected president of the United States of America.  Since then he’s been given specific purpose to fear and hate black people and allowed to blame all his own failures and shortcomings on people whose only difference is the color of their skin.

Not just one shit stain lost his mind,  half the goddamn country has.

The second it begins, the right wing religious assholes don’t even break stride in their relentless campaign of obfuscation to render culpable the first black president.  It’s all his fault.  How dare he get elected twice. They stop at nothing.  Shame and hypocrisy are mere divots in a smooth green field to them.  Such routine violence is ascribed to trends of acceptance and equality for everyone from gay and transgendered to immigrants and black Americans.

It’s an attack on Christians and of course it is racism to point out the impetus was exclusively racist.

It’s everyone’s fault but theirs.

They relentlessly spin it away from anything to do with bigotry and the sick fetish for guns in our culture.  They just can’t abide a lingering look at this latest horror.  Any prolonged bearing of witness to the very worst of our kind slithering from under rocks and out of caves to visit misery. Any scrutiny of the those among us emboldened by the craven fantasy of a  president on the verge of sending troops to confiscate anything resembling a firearm from every American household.

It’s all about that fetish.  They don’t give a mad fuck about protecting their families.  They aren’t actually worried about the grid failing and battling their neighbors for sustenance.  That’s all bullshit.  The second amendment is nothing but a goddamn slogan to them.  They only fear the potential emasculation writ large for them by the NRA of losing their guns to the nigger in chief.

I loath the NRA. Because without it we would have at least some amount less of these tragedies. Because Wayne LaPierre could not give less of a shit that without him there would be less of them.  Because the NRA is organized crime.  Because they masquerade as a group of innocuous defenders of the second amendment when they are actually a cabal of greasy lobbyists who agitate the hardest case dumbasses in this country into thinking they need some sort of arsenal to prepare for the coming race war.  Because they paint it as holy and even some kind of civic duty.

I really hate them.  Because they have somehow managed to be on the lips of every callow redneck confederate flag waving asshole from Florida to Arizona. Because they are able to get otherwise reasonably sane people to buy into this crap.  They have so successfully plumbed the paranoia of the contemporary American male, they are able to exploit millions of them with hubris but without reservation.

Because they effortlessly paint every new atrocity as one side or another didn’t have enough fucking firepower.  If there were just more guns, everything would be just fine.  What we need is more guns.  Every injustice can be resolved with some obtuse Dirty Harry doctrine.  If only everyone had a goddamn gun, the good guys would win every time.

Because the more they foment fear and prejudice, the NRA and every other pig at the trough rakes in a shitload more money.

I hate the NRA because they will not allow us to even try things.  We need to try things for fuck’s sake.  We need actual universal, comprehensive background checks and a data base for people who would purchase a gun, a dozen guns or more than a thousand rounds.  Whatever.  People who have felonies, mental disorders, or even a propensity for railing against other “groups”.  A list of people with a history of violence or meaningful conversations with the disembodied.

We have such a list for anyone who aspires to ride on a commercial airplane. No one in this country has ever been killed by a shoe bomb but we all have take our shoes off before we can get on one.

What about liability insurance?  Maybe everyone who buys a lethal weapon should have an insurance policy that will pay out the nose if the bastard accidentally or intentionally ends a life with it for any reason other than self preservation.  The notorious avarice of insurance companies could be the antidote for the infamous greed of gun merchants.

But we can’t even have that conversation.

The president is an asshole for confronting the ubiquity of guns in our country instead of just letting folks grieve.  Somehow, he is the one politicizing it because he points out an ostentatiously aberrant problem with no equal anywhere else in the civilized world.  He is chastised and pilloried by the media, our elected representatives and half the electorate for daring to point out the obvious carcinogen.

Somehow, by being nothing but forthright and germane, he’s too soon and too much for pointing out this crazy fucker would have only been marginallysuccessful at the sporadic hematoma if he was limited to plastic spoons.

I am done with you idiots that would suggest we talk about anything other than how we can realistically mitigate this problem.  Regulation.  Common sense.  There is no substitute.  There is no longer any excuse for eschewing responsibility.  Fuck you if you want to whine about the looming potential of a home invasion because violent crime is at a historic low.  Yeah yeah, criminals will always have guns.  If you don’t live among criminals then piss up a rope.  If you’re that worried about it, lock your doors and windows, get a home security system and keep a Louisville slugger by your bed.  If you’re not crazy you can even have a gun.  Seriously, despite the odds that you’ll die by it or kill your spouse being exponentially higher.

No shit, if any of this happens to you it’s unlikely you’ll be wearing your holster.

Open carry is absurd.  I don’t automatically assume you’re hung like a gnat if you own a gun but I’m confident you resemble a Ken Doll sans underwear if you think it’s normal to strap your AR15 on before you go grocery shopping or out for ice cream.   If you find yourself in the middle of some stick up, run or get on the floor like the bastard says because if you’re packing you’ll probably be the first to taste your own blood.  Stop fantasizing about being a hero.  Life isn’t a comic book and you’re not in an action movie.

So relax, and shut the fuck up, you can have your goddamn guns as long as you’re not a goofecock nutter planning to shoot up the local Starbuck’s and willing to prove it by submitting to an objective process.  Nobody wants to take your precious guns away as long as you are sane and willing to prove it.

There’s no way that’s too much to ask.

And South Carolina, take down that stupid fucking flag.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

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