An immodest proposal on guns

Blinn Combs, a philosopher-turned-lawyer in Texas, posted the following on Facebook and kindly gave permission to share it here:

Please, for the love of sanity, please stop saying conciliatory shit to people who'd just as soon see your children gunned down at school.

 

We ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAVE two radical fringe extremes in what passes for the gun debate. We have one party dominated by absolute lunatics who've been pushing for years toward a lawless, dystopian, gun-infested, violence-saturated state.

 

And we have a feckless opposition party that demands ineffective, mindless half-measures. No matter what those feeble-minded fools in the democratic party say, they'll be painted by the lunatics on the other side as gun-banning anti-American radicals.

 

The problem is that we do absolutely need actual radicals. Actual living, breathing, and most of all THINKING people to demand actual, radical change, just to bring us into minimally civilized alignment with the rest of the world. We must stop endless, stupid debates about the meaning of the Second Amendment. The Heller decision should have signaled the end of polite debate, because it was and is a total farce.

 

But whatever Blackstone or Jefferson or Madison said, we need urgently to recognize that the 2nd Amendment was--and was understood to be at its drafting--a reactionary farce that died within a decade of its birth, and now lies rotten in its grave, hauting us as the ground of a right-wing death pact. There's a reason that only one other country in the benighted world has anything like it--Mexico. And they quite rightly read it as compatible with having all of one heavily-regulated state-owned gun story in the entire country. But we've long-since passed the point where such reasonable means are sufficient. We should, by all means, organize to repeal the 2nd Amendment. But here's what we should also do:

 

1. Push for and organize buy-backs and disarmament campaigns;

 

2. Rally outside gun stores. Gun fetishists should be made to feel as awkward as any woman walking into a Planned Parenthood has ever felt.

 

3. Demand bans on all firearms. There's simply no minimally plausible argument for going around armed. It simply, provably, makes all of us less safe.

 

4. Stop getting into arguments about history. Literally nobody gives the slightest shit. The pretense of caring is a total fucking sham.

 

5. Stop getting into arguments about "defensive" gun uses. People who use that phrase are fucking soulless idiots.

 

6. Stop arguing about the statistics of gun safety. Guns are inherently dangerous. Everybody who doesn't understand this on a basic level is too stupid to participate in the hard work of public policy. There's DECADES of research to prove this, but the people on the other side don't argue in good faith and score points among innumerate fools by spouting sheer nonsense.

 

7. Stop pushing for bullshit half-measures like "assault rifle" bans. They're a waste of space, and decades in, the only thing they've done is suck all the oxygen out of any meaningful reform.

 

8. Get rid of your own guns and urge everybody you know to get rid of theirs. Everything we know about guns shows us that just having them around makes you inherently less safe.

 

9. Recognize that nothing will move the Republican party on this. They've had their chance, and they picked their poison. They're simply, irretrievably on the side of the child killers now. Don't give them cover, don't give them comfort, and for the love of basic decency, quit acting like they want the same world you do. They don't.

 

10. Become the opposition the lunatics rail against. Don't flee that role; revel in it. Make friends with the simple, unvarnished truth and to hell with the mindless moderates.

 

I disagree with some bits of this (I'd settle right now for assault rifle bans and buybacks!), but the basic attitude would be preferable if it came from the one party not on the side of the child (and also cop) killers. (Police would prefer much stricter gun laws; how the Repugs get away with putting their lives in danger through their venal stupidity is also mysterious.)