I keep waiting for the recent “Open Carry” movement in Texas to spark an impromptu firefight at some surburban shopping center. Can you imagine how the media would react? “Terror in the aisles at Golden Corral: hot brass sizzles in the country gravy as dozens of clueless people who have never discharged a firearm in anger finally decide to let’er rip near the Corn Nugget and Fried Chicken stations. Blood-drenched Texas Game of Thrones Wedding reenactment goes horribly wrong as morons with loaded firearms (painted cute colors because ‘ha ha you suk’) exercise their right to gun down other shoppers. Now available on Pay Per View, film at 11.”
I can’t help but thinking that such irresponsible, over-the-top firearm “enthusiasts” and stupid stunts like this are nothing but detrimental to the best interests of law-abiding, responsible gun owners.
That kind of threatening “ha ha, you can’t stop us” tactic is the same shit that Westboro Baptist pulls in order to garner publicity. It’s roughly as wise (and effective) as dressing up in KKK garb and marching down the street as a protest to Affirmative Action (or whatever it is that people who own KKK garb formally oppose). Yes, it draws attention to your cause. But it is attention of the wrong sort. It is attention of the “everybody needs to communally reject people who pull this sort of disruptive, crazy, overly-threatening shit” variety.
No wonder our school system is in such deep trouble, if this is the caliber (heh) of graduate being produced. It also seems to be generational; dumbassedness seems to travel along genealogical lines.
Two things:
1. If you are an uneducated jerk, it’s kind of hard to raise your kid not to be one.
2. It’s too easy to just fob it off on the schools, without paying any attention to what’s being taught and where school tax money is actually being spent, by whom, and for what.
Meanwhile, any calm voice of reason is instantly rejected by the various pros or cons on either side of the argument. It’s now reached the point that I no longer care to identify with either end of the political spectrum.
Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal… no thanks. How about this?
“I follow after my own thinking and my own desires.”
Since nothing of any import will ever be solved by arguing it over an online digital social destination, it’s all just ranting for self-entertainment, and the entertainment of others, anyway.
But expect the fanatics to try. And to howl their outrage to the heavens, in a vain attempt to drown out the other side. Despite what various political pundits say, those forces exist on both sides. Both teams have been infiltrated.
C’est la politique.
Though when religion enters into it (and it usually does) it might make a certain amount of sense for both political sides to be careful what they assume about those who inhabit the political middle, or to mistakenly believe it to be comprised solely of atheists and secular humanists. There are good Christians on BOTH the left and right side of the political aisle, and at the dead center, trying to sort through the nonsensical claptrap coming from both ends.
I consider myself Christian and I don’t feel vilified by the Political Left, per se. I catch more flak from the extreme Right, rather, who seem to believe they and their ilk have the sole license to the Christian religion, despite the millions of non-Fundamentalists out there. I DO see a lot of proselytizing by
certain religious spokesmen demanding special governmental treatment for their specific religious groups (often at the expense of OTHER religious groups), and a lot of that rhetoric (not all— the anti-religionists can be just as obnoxious) seems to come from the extreme Right.
Again: political parties should probably pay attention to those whom they marginalize and disenfranchise, unless those parties are okay with hemorrhaging millions of votes in every election.
As a Christian gun owner I can see how that combination— religion and firearms— might turn deadly under the wrong circumstances, when fanaticism is involved. Just as guns and Islam can prove similarly lethal in identical situations.
Which is why it makes sense to leave the guns at home while shopping… or, at the very least, why it’s so ridiculously stupid to carry them around town and use them to terrorize others for sick kicks.