OpEds: The unconquerable gun mind fungus

MIKE INGLES

I watched some of Joe Scarborough this morning. He is doing what his handlers expect of him, he is trying to deflect responsibility of the mass-murder of children to video-game manufactures and Quentin Tarantino, citing studies done at this university and that university, dredging up all the nonsense discussed, ad nauseam, during other times of mass-murder in our country.

It’s a watershed moment for us.

If the deaths of these children is not enough to stir true emotion (and a little guilt) in our hearts, and rescue the sanity of us acting in unison towards a common goal, then there is little chance that our society can “long endure.” Perhaps, Joe is right. Maybe we have been, collectively, so desensitized by movies and a culture of violence, that changing gun laws by itself will not solve the problem. But what he and his ilk fail to acknowledge is that stopping the proliferation of weapons is a necessary first step. The reason that we cannot resolve the problem is that clever lobbyist and Machiavellian gun-makers have financed not only favorable gun-laws, but financed media—magazines, television, radio—that warns people that the government is their enemy and officials want to disarm them and take away rights—inalienable rights—therefore they must hoard weapons to get ready for the next holocaust, and pay dues to the NRA to help finance a next generation of protectionist propaganda.

“Let me remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”

Still watching Joe and his gang of numbnuts: They are reporting a poll that found that only 60% of us support banning assault weapons. So, 40% of us are so very infected with fear and hate and suspicions that they literally see this world through a different lens than I. It’s generational. Since Barry Goldwater uttered those famous words in 1964, that crazed minority in our country has proliferated, has grown disproportionally. As it grew, we liberals laughed at them, not taking them seriously. Their sickness is contagious; they cannot recognize that the bullet-ridden bodies of 20 six-year-old children are cause-and-effect of their distorted beliefs. Still a minority, they vote in Republican primaries where crazy thought processes gather form and are spewed back to a populace eager to read articles where their fears are manifested in glossy magazines and radio shows and Fox News. We all understand that, because of this, the minority moves ever further to the right, taking positions that are more and more extreme. Most are poorly educated folk and can be easily swayed by clever people supporting a false position. Much like Hitler and his media convinced the German rank-in-file that they had a serious problem with an industrious people; these folks are convinced that government is their industrious enemy [and] that the government is the cause of their problems.

Maybe not enough children have died. Perhaps, it will take some other catastrophe for us to come together. Deep inside, I know that those 40% are alien to me. They might as well be fungi from Mars. How do you negotiate with fungi? How do you establish laws with folks who aren’t living on the same planet?

I can’t see a peaceful end to this on-going debate. The next time some nut grabs an assault weapons and starts shooting up a mall or a theater or a school, I’ll die a little bit. And, those NRA folks will shake their heads and say—it’s a damned shame. But they won’t mean it. Not really. What they really think is that Quentin Tarantino caused all this, and silently clean their weapons.

MIKE INGLES fires his daily rational torpedoes from his den in Ohio.