Only An Idiot Thinks They’ll Take Your Guns

These posts keep showing up in my timeline, and here’s the disclaimer: I wish I had the reserve to keep my mouth shut, because I’m passionately indifferent about gun control. It is politically untenable and pragmatically impossible. The “war on drugs” has cost us billions, with billions more to be spent, and for what: we give up (and rightly so) on demonizing marijuana and face growing problems with both methamphetamine and a buffet of misused gourmet narcotics, not to mention a shocking and disgusting epidemic of heroin use. Yeh, heroin–the drug that, when I was a kid, was identified with back alley junkies half a step removed from the walking dead, is cool.

And we want to repeat this with guns? Piffle. It is fairy tale idealism like this that makes me cringe when folks mistake me for being a liberal because I like trees better than people, and schools better than corporations. Still, the question I must ask is this: just who the hell do you think is “making us give up our guns?”

The answer is NO ONE. Oh, there are people out there who loudly express their desire for a gun free society, who desperately want harsh gun control, but it’s like I tell me kids: I want a pony, but nobody is lining up to give me one, not even for my birthday.

Now, some folks want to make it a more discerning process to get more guns, but never once has anyone with any authority or influence made any attempt to legally, systematically take away weapons from honest people. The hysteric paranoia in this regard verges on the absurd. People defend invasive government infringements on personal liberties such as “stop and frisk” by saying “if you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t mind” but when someone says “maybe a longer waiting period and more exhaustive and comprehensive background checks to find out if you’re a felon or a loony” is akin to the Germans rolling on into Poland. The only people talking about taking guns away from citizens are the NRA which, it is good to remember, is legally incorporated not as a grass roots advocacy group, but as an industrial marketing and lobbying organization.