Our Second Modest Proposal: Gun Control
a plan to solve everyone's concerns and problems with private charity
This is not fedposting
We are not firearm owners, and we live in countries where it is illegal to do so. We obey the law, but encourage no one else to live without risk.
We do however come from America. There owning firearms appears to have attracted all manner of blame for incidents where ultimate responsibility is hard to lay at the feet of gun manufacturers. In fact, the problem seems to be far more fundamental. The truth is, the fun with guns makes no sense to the morally opposed. And fun is no argument against morality. Otherwise the Pilgrims would’ve come down a bit less hard on witches and sodomy.
Gunfun is illegible
Guns exist for most people in America as a dangerous kind of toy. A hobbyist and enthusiast kind of explosive, where marksmanship is a fun skill, gun nerd stuff is like customizing a PC or a car, and the practical benefits in terms of defense and recreation are high.
Unfortunately, criminals shoot each other and innocents with alarming regularity, and every now and again there is a massacre driven either as political terrorism or the actions of the mentally deranged. Thousands and thousands are dead every year, and seemingly these deaths are preventable.
But they are certainly not preventable by law. Not only is there no functioning legislative body in America, the closest thing we have to a functioning politburo is the Supreme Court, which is likely to remain in favor of access to guns. Among the political class there is no consensus agreement on anything except for the need to sell guns on credit to foreign nations who can never pay back their debts.
The race-and-class argument
The American right wing explication regarding this massacre phenomenon, unique to America, typically boils down to the racial and sometimes more innocently, a class question. Most often: “Why are blackness or poorness and criminality so effortlessly synonymous?” Their implied answer, is they are naturally this way, it is genetic and inescapable. Many such interlocutors are fond of arguing that demographics are destiny. This is moronic and contravened by historical example. Yet, if we are to admit that the FBI is neither lying racistly about crime statistics nor orchestrating most violence, then their argument has (some) merit. At the same time, the different responses to it are facile and dull and tedious, and overdone elsewhere by both whackier and more erudite writers.
The market-focused argument
The American left wing explication regarding this massacre phenomenon, typically boils down to a problem of supply and demand. Supply and demand are peanut butter and jelly, without the two together, there is no sandwich, and if there is no sandwich, only the fattest and dumbest among us will eat straight from the jar. There are too many guns. It’s too easy to get them. Therefore, people, being evil, stupid, and violent, will often fire their guns into crowds, sometimes from their room in the Mandalay Bay, with no discernible motive, only to be forgotten about days later with no investigation. To solve the problem, if you take guns away, the murderous will murder in less efficient ways and therefore murder less, and only the most murderous will attempt to murder at all. Again, this, like the racial argument, is facile and dull and tedious, like most things American.
A much more interesting solution
Instead of relitigating all of the ways in which people massacre each other, and their whys and hows and how to keep it from happening, we will instead propose today a charitable solution by which, by merely giving everyone swords, we will turn swords to ploughshares.
Everyone gets a gun. The NRA, some other industry lobbyist group, or some gun owners group, sets up a program to distribute to everyone nice firearm in working order. Now of course, the world is preparing for war, thanks to the actions and decisions of the United States. And we know good guns are hard to buy, and ammunition is dear.
But, please, share your wealth. Give everyone a gun. The end goal: Every man, woman, and child, should know the joy and grave (but not all that grave) responsibility of having a gun. Make it a blind box thing for all the urbanites and their love of surprise. It should show up in people's mailboxes, delivered by private couriers. Everyone needs a gun.
A novel solution to resist the ATF
This will be tricky to pull off, ATF will likely strike quickly, and they are by far the worst of the worst when it comes to the hated police. Perhaps you like cops, but it is rare to meet the police apologist in America who won't spit on an ATF agent with the right magic words. Usually Ruby Ridge or Waco are enough to break the spell of 'All Lives Matter' or whatever nonsense thought suppressants they vomit up. I tell you now, the ATF will shut down this noble charity, and it will go down in history as the greatest logistical feat in history.
Perhaps the Chinese can be enlisted in this. While the Chinese are accustomed to using (waged) slavery to accomplish any and all tasks, they may yet have answers to the question of how to distribute 200 million guns appropriately to every household.
The distribution advantages of the no-guns crowd
The happy news is, this will be a geographically simple task--the anti gun crowd is typically quite geographically concentrated. They will be easy to target, packages can be delivered with greater efficiency in cities. The rural areas, having both necessity and knowledge of gunfun, will likely be able to get by simply by sharing.
This violates many federal laws regarding who can and cannot get guns. This is another reason to use difficult to prosecute Chinese nationals! The diplomatic harmony in person-to-person exchanges, that kind of grassroots, meeting your neighbor kind of diplomacy is truly invaluable. It may add a day, even two, to the now-inevitable invasion timeline for the doomed island nation of Taiwan. Every day of peace is a treasure we must all learn to value.
What will happen? Why are you saying this?
What will happen when everyone gets a gun? This is also our answer to “Why should everyone get a gun?”
First, there will be a massive spike in violence. Criminals, the foolish, the psychotic, the angry, the spiteful, the mentally and spiritually diseased, they will kill each other and themselves. This is the accelerationist in our collective singing in harmony with the pessimist: they would have ended up dead, a burden to society, or in prison eventually.
Second, the chaos will make the lovely life of peace Americans undervalue more dear, and more desired. Americans will become less warlike after they get killing each other out of their systems.
Learn to love your treasure
Think about it. The already chaotic parts of America's cities, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, or Seattle, would give way to warlordism quickly. The police are demoralized, the citizens are stupid and addicted to drugs, and the smartest are as likely as not to be non-citizens or merely possessed of excellent opportunities a plane ride away. Truly, they’re unnecessary for the building of a stronger loving world.
The less-violent in America lack spirit, civic virtue, the mere will to live as citizens. We say, there is no better way to find gold than in a pit. Should the remainder of the federal government not find itself pleased with this turn of events, it would be trivial for the US military to restore order and peace, with partisans defeated in a series of bloody, pitched battles over what would likely be a year or so of campaigning. Worst case, the west coast nationalists would get their free and liberated Pacifica, lead by minorities who could readily be called Maoists by the half-alive drones of Current Affairs.
The old tired nagging cliché
Third, good fences make good neighbors. The best fences were like the ones of Byzantium, full of murder holes, ways to covertly drop Greek fire onto the sea below, and crenellations to give archers cover from below while optimum vantage points to shoot downward. Following the spike in violence and its repression, many would find, they don't have to take shit from anyone. And also, not too many are inclined to give them shit. Perhaps living under threat of death would resocialize Americans.
The health advantages of a high stress lifestyle
Running for cover and learning to master recoil and carry even a fraction of the many loads of a soldier will improve the abysmal hormonal sludge Americans call blood, and help reduce the fetid congealed vegetable oil that they call their flesh. There are health benefits to reconceptualizing yourself as a warrior, and an invitation to violence is the call to adventure of all great myths. Achilles of course did not need his sword delivered to him. But his reincarnation today, should he live in America, likely does.
We are not warriors by nature, but this is certainly a moral hazard for the most warlike nation on the face of the Earth today. To deserve the right to have a global empire, infinite money printed by a private corporation above the state, the unprecedented global propaganda arms, the megacorps, the research infrastructure, it is imperative that Americans walk the walk. To live as we do, upside down, means we must be reborn as something better than mere subjects of domination by passive corporate wills.
The Marxist explication of mass shootings
Mass shootings can stop, because the problem is often that they simply have lived in a world of virtual violence. This is Bifo Berardi's thesis in a nutshell, and his excellent Heroes is a Marxist take we can endorse and extend, because he has spirit and little to say about this cargo cult of the pimply-assed German fellow. If the problem is a world of virtual violence and null values without any material release, we can make it all too concrete.
People live in a world where all traditional values are in abeyance, and insect life is what appears to be the most profitable. This is an uncharitable read of modern life of course. It offers convenience, comfort, pleasures diverse and excellent. There are many beautiful people, though their supply is dwindling. There are many intelligent people, but they are getting dumber. The mass shooter strikes at the society that rejected them, to become like a hero, striking against the injustice afflicting them first, and by proxy, the injustice that afflicts us all. In their mind, they are Heroes.
So, make them heroes now. Make them shoot a rapist armed with a gun. Or be a rapist, armed with a gun, shot heroically by their victim. In fact, make them wonder, if I go to a kindergarten, won't I just get shot by some sweet lady whose job is to care for kids?
Why don’t other societies have mass shootings?
They are not at war all the time, while never experiencing war. Canada is a peaceful, easily conquered Potemkin country. War and violence are the only instructive forces that war and violence are bad. Therefore, it is necessary for the warlike, violent, and bizarrely stupid to be educated, through a program of mass charity and predictable consequences.
We will have to discard all of our affection for our current life to find what truly drives our bonds and what lies beneath. We must reveal society. This is apocalypse, of course, in its barest sense. And we invite the gun owners of America to find a way, by hook or by crook to get everyone a gun and to ask them, why not shoot the first thing you see today? Invite them to the range if you know them well. Or make a friend over the smell of cordite. But for the unreachables, maybe a blind box can overcome their hatred of you for having a different, more dangerous hobby.
Surely, we have not persuaded the anti-gun crowd. So, as a final appeal, in list format, we attempt to speak your language.
Hear us, redditors
Rick Sanchez loves guns. How else could he shoot his family so often, if he did not have guns?
Don't you hate your family?
Do you hate your enemies?
Don't you hate your boss?
Don't you hate all people who disagree with you, both politically, socially, and morally?
Don't you love getting blind boxes?
Without guns, how could Ukrainians bring glory to their nation, and death to the Slavs to their east? Arming every Ukrainian citizen has made them noble and powerful.
This is what Bane would do, and he was the best mayor of Gotham City. Not only did the rich and corrupt die and the police suffer, but the crime rate dropped to zero, but in the end, they built an uncannily lifelike statue of Batman out of plastic.
This is how Harry beat Voldemort. Using a convoluted owner-recognition system on Voldemort's 'gun', Harry was able to shoot Voldemort using his own 'gun' at the climactic battle of Hogwarts.
Luke Skywalker used guns. Mandalorian used guns. Leia used guns. Han Solo, Lando, and Chewbacca used guns. A lightsaber is like a gun--remember in The Last Jedi when Adam Driver used his lightsaber like a gun? By that standard, even Yoda used a gun.
Picard used guns in the Star Trek movies to shoot the Borg.
Waterguns are like guns, that shoot water. So are laser guns, paintball guns, nerf guns, and airsoft guns.
This is why you, the redditor should endorse population level armament.