In what has proven to be an excruciatingly close race, I think it self-evident that the subset of the American population which is most susceptible toward marketing, most prone to having the biases, fetishes, quirks and whims of the most self-serving others shape how they think and feel in direct conflict with the reality abounding, are the gun fanatics.
Going by the BBC, which is certainly not a leftwing rag, there are over 70 million more guns than citizens in the USA. In a population of approximately 320 million, there are enough guns for all to have one, with over 70 million extras. But considerably less than half of the population are gun owners, which means that almost 400 million guns total are spread out among less than 160 million people. But sure, let’s blame pollution for karma’s hard work.
I enjoy poking fun at the idea that maybe Hollywood could call it a day, closing up shop eternally with the accumulated millions of hours of films and TV programs already existing being more than anyone could watch in their own lifetime. When is enough a thing? Does the term of enough exist in the lexicons of capitalism? I ask, because the political partisanship expected to rein in the madness nowhere ever approaches the idea of perhaps giving cease and desist orders to gun manufacturers themselves, and nobody anywhere calls them out for this.
If we are to engage the fantasies of the official narrative, where election outcomes are not preordained by society’s most glutinous, then the last time there was a surge in conservative voters was when they accepted the racist Dixiecrats into their folds of beer belly flesh, a full decade before I was even born. Voter turnout in the national-level election cycles since have largely been of the same numbers, although whenever there is a slight uptick in turnout it tends to be for liberal candidates. Recognizing this is the singular catalyst for current widespread efforts at disenfranchising voter rights in states nationwide. And still, the best the competing political party can do is to redress existing gun regulations, or propose restrictions on sales for certain firearms to certain peoples as though the drug history of an individual is what kills groups of innocent bystanders rather than the bullets themselves. Biden may have won more votes in this last Presidential election than any candidate in national history, but those 80 million or so voters are themselves maybe a quarter of the total population. Even combined with those who voted for Trump, less than half of the population’s interests are being represented, their fates left in the hands of a disingenuous minority sold on the marketing that their partisan leaders are willing or able to see the suicidal forest for the trees. The liberals complain about conservatives recycling the same self-centered arguments in the aftermath of daily mass shootings, yet the liberals themselves accept the same balms as ever. Meanwhile, the conservatives sold on viewing their lethal instruments as more patriotic than the well-being of their fellow Americans, entertain the wild fantasy that a government made fully dependent on the revenue streams of one of the most lucrative industries ever devised might ever come to take their guns away, presumably sending law enforcement officers or military troops largely rightwing themselves to do the heavy lifting in the matter. When former and current badges and soldiers undoubtedly comprise a large portion, if not the largest portion, of those proud gun owners. The mass production of guns will continue and private gun ownership will continue and the selling of arms nationally and abroad will continue, because Americans want neither truth or justice but fantastic illusion, where victimizers can rationalize themselves as the victimized, and where their opposition are ever actually doing anything substantial to oppose.
I’m reminded of beer commercials of 30-some years ago, one side arguing their favorite product “tastes great” and the other side arguing in response how their favorite product, the same product, has “less filling” with neither side in the great divide pausing to wonder why they should obsess so much with appraising a for-profit oblivion to begin with.
What if adults have permitted childlike minds to play for long enough?
What if the preservation of all life is slightly more than tantamount to any bias, fetish, quirk or whim regardless of window dressing, sales pitch or yoga pants?
The larger portion of the population, the ones mindfully or not giving no time to egos of the national stage, should really consider getting organized through means and methods more intrinsically stable than Facebook groups or Twitter lists. They should organize under the self-awareness of being predominately what this storied government is purported to be of, by and for, taking their fates into their own hands and thus confiscating broadly. Take guns of friends, family and neighbors and destroy them, dismantling and tossing to the winds no matter how illegal such an act may be in spite of their endangering lives not actually being a constitutional right but rather the most direct, most extreme infringement of inalienable civil and basic human rights to life and liberty. Living by threat of justifying lethal force against Americans under any circumstances is an ass-backwards approach to patriotism for America. Take the enablest of egomania government with as much non-lethal force as necessary and destroy it as well, for good, and for the good of all, even should smoking ruins be the foundation from which to build any kind of tomorrow. Because meeting killers halfway means that lives and livelihoods will be devastated nonetheless, and because if facts were all that were necessary for good to prevail they do not seem to be applying to those unwilling or unable to trade fantasy for education, or morality.