The party of poison
You all know the story by now. On Friday a knucklehead with an AR-type penis extender murdered a family and their eight year old child “execution-style” because someone asked him if he would please not fire his gun into the air. It was keeping the baby awake. Presumably the inadequate, knuckle-dragging cretin murdered them because he thought they were infringing on his rights. The deranged moron is still at large as I write this.
Republicans responded immediately, rushing fatuous thoughts and preposterous prayers to the scene. The Republican mechanism to do absolutely nothing about this latest tragedy was cocked and reloaded, if you’ll pardon the expression, to be fired again the minute it’s required for another mass shooting. It won’t have long to wait.
Not cancer, not car crashes, not lightning bolts from the blue but guns are now the leading cause of death in American children. Fifty thousand Americans die unnecessarily each year thanks to this uniquely American gun fetish. That’s a thousand a week, week in and week out.
Because this is ostensibly about “human rights,” as long as Republicans have anything to say about it, absolutely nothing will be done about gun butchery, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Apart from the cold-blooded method used to murder innocent people, this latest hideous act was the worst in — not a decade, not a year, not even a month — in a WEEK. Before too much longer it will be the worst in an afternoon, or even the worst at, say, the six o’clock hour.
The solution, according to the bought-and-paid for NRA ammosexual whores we laughingly refer to as Republicans, is more guns. You read that right. More guns. You see, the problem with America is that the American people only have 400 million guns. That’s more per capita than any other nation on earth.
Compare that with India. India has a population of 1.4 billion people and only 71.1 million guns. Per one hundred people, Americans own 120 guns. Compare that with America’s next nearest competitor, the Falkland Islands. They own 66 guns per 100. In Great Britain where I live, the number is only about 5 per hundred.
In 1996, before there was serious gun control in Britain, a whack-job shitweasel named Thomas Hamilton shot 16 pupils and one teacher dead, injured 15 others, then did the world a favour and turned his gun on himself. That happened in Dunblane, Scotland. The mallet-headed bastard used handguns. Imagine what he could have achieved with an AR-15. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history.
Brits were horrified. They did more than send stupid thoughts and contemptible prayers. They changed the law. The incident led to a public campaign, called the “Snowdrop Petition,” which helped bring about legislation that outlawed the private ownership of most handguns within Great Britain, with few exceptions. The law was later extended to place similar controls on rifles. Nobody can own an AR-15 in Britain, by the way. Mass shootings are extremely rare in Britain.
But Republicans insist that America’s problem is there aren’t enough guns. How many is enough? A billion, perhaps? Since the average American already owns 1.2 guns each, how are more guns going to help? You can only fire one gun at a time.
Of course the “logic” is contemptible. Republicans want more guns because it means more money for themselves and the NRA. They don’t give a crap about dead children any more than they give a crap about dead babies from abortions. In both cases it’s all about bucks and votes. They vote for more guns and less abortions because that’s where the money and the votes are. If the money and the votes were with fewer guns and more abortions then they’d vote that way.
They speak of rights. What about my rights? What about the rights of every American to be free of this awful gun culture, where most states are now open carry states and every brain dead yo-yo has a piece strapped to his expanding waistline? Isn’t not being arbitrarily murdered a right? Of course it is. But there’s no money and there’s no votes in that.
Well I have a solution. I moved to Britain. I won’t live in a country that lets murder happen as a daily routine because it’s profitable. I won’t live in a country that has no universal healthcare because letting people who can’t afford insurance die is profitable.
Cops don’t even carry guns here and they do just fine, because bad guys don’t carry guns. When the occasional bad guy gets his hands on a gun, a special armed task force is employed. It works beautifully. Gun deaths are almost nonexistent here.
That’s how you solve that problem. Republicans know this and they refuse to act. That’s reason number 496 of why the Republican Party must cease to exist. It’s the party of poison, and it’s getting worse. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.