Live And Let Die

https://apple.news/ALCkx-noxRk659K6MujCwHA

The price for our freedom to have guns has become the degradation

 of every other freedom we have.

>While Highland Park captured the most media attention, all in all, 220 Americans were shot and killed over the holiday weekend. That doesn’t include five people who survived being shot during the fireworks after an Oakland A’s game—hit by stray, apparently celebratory bullets from a high-powered rifle fired outside the ballpark. Or two police officers shot—again perhaps by accident—at the Fourth of July fireworks display in Philadelphia.

...  You’d be hard-pressed to find an institution in this country that isn’t buckling under the weight of a gun fetish that has seen domestic firearms production triple since 2000 and a steady rise in mass shootings, as right-wing courts and state legislatures repeal rules and politicians and gunmakers stoke fears of tyranny and civil war. America now has more guns than people, according to one estimate.

...It’s an argument you hear from open-carry activists too: “My Rights … Don’t End Where Your Fear Begins.”<

The last statement, unsurprisingly, totally misses the point. The freedom of these gun cultist ends where my life and the lives of my children and the lives of my grandchildren and the lives of my great-grandchildren end!

>...the law professors Joseph Blocher and Reva B. Siegel note that armed riders were banned from market and fairs back in 14th-century England. Most U.S. states adopted laws against “brandishing” in the 19th century, and in 1874, the Georgia Supreme Court, in a typical piece of reasoning about the limited scope of the Second Amendment, wrote, “The practice of carrying arms at courts, elections and places of worship, etc., is a thing so improper in itself, so shocking to all sense of propriety” that the Framers could never have intended it.

...On the one hand, plenty of Republicans are scared shitless: “Both parties have extremists,” a GOP lawmaker told Politico after the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. “There’s a difference in our crazy people and their crazy people. Our crazy people have an excessive amount of arms. They have gun safes. They have grenades. They believe in the Second Amendment. They come here and Trump’s made them think this is the Alamo.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly warned members of Congress not to verbally attack one another over their upcoming impeachment votes for fear of endangering their lives (presumably at the hands of armed Trump supporters).<

Please note that even Republicans are afraid of extremist gun cultist Republicans. They know these people are a danger to civilized society but feel they must  be allowed to play their little war games like I did when I was eight (of course, I did it with toy guns and with other little boys who willingly joined in the game).  These children occupying grown-up disguises actually leave dead bodies in their wake.

And, in a completely non-shocking state of affairs; this absolute, total, undeniable, God given right of every decent free human being to carry guns and threaten innocent people by their mere  presence only applies to white men. However, we should know that no conservative Republican is ever, ever racist. Calling them that is offensive.   After all, is it racist to say that every armed black man should automatically be killed on sight?

>...Or at least—it works for them. For others, it’s not even an option. During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the Louisiana Republican Congressman Clay Higgins said the quiet part loud, posting a photo of armed Black men on his Facebook page and writing, “If this shows up, we’ll consider the armed presence a real threat. … I wouldn’t even spill my beer. I’d drop any 10 of you where you stand.”

 

...In Oklahoma last month, a man in a tactical vest carrying a semi-automatic rifle scared everyone he saw: Government employees locked the doors to their building. Target shoppers called 911 from the parking lot, and AT&T employees fled the store when he entered. What got the man in trouble with the police, finally, was his brass knuckles—those are illegal in Oklahoma. Whether out of fear or sympathy, police seem incapable of restraining armed, right-wing demonstrators.<

So you see carrying a weapon designed for assaulting enemy units while dressed for war is terrifying, but it’s perfectly OK. However, you better not have any brass knuckles in your pocket! 

America has gone totally completely, utterly, and certifiably insane.