America lives inside a gun violence nightmare because of magical thinking that “more guns equals more safety”. The tell that this is magical thinking and not reality is that there’s zero data to back it up. Even when a data set sits on their chest and slaps them sillier than the worst schoolyard bully, conservative thinking insists there is not a schoolyard bully sitting on them – you’re a witch and you’ve cast a spell – that’s why they’re on the ground! Every dead or wounded child or teacher from Uvalde is a data set unto themselves that proves the “Good guys with a gun” theory couldn’t work even on its best day. The “Good Guys With Guns” better all be Terminators if they want to compete with the bad guys with guns. And those bad guys are armed like a drug cartel because those Good Guys happily passed laws to let them arm up that way!

There really is no end to the “stupid” here.

If we made it a law that you had bring receipts to every legislation debate, America would already be a paragon of progressive government. That’s because our heads would be in charge, not our hearts. Where governing is concerned, that’s how it has to be! Leadership demands the deepest, widest perspective. And part of that perspective is recognizing the perspective. That’s real life three dimensional chess. Four dimensional. If gun lovers had to bring actual receipts to every gun debate, they’d lose.

Let’s start with the stone cold fact that a “right” to “gun ownership” appears nowhere in the Second Amendment. It just doesn’t. James Madison was pre-fighting the Civil War within the amendment. What “tyranny” were all those citizens so afraid of a federal government imposing on them? An end to slavery, that’s what.

The tyranny that the white, Christian land-owners most feared was that they’d actually have to live up to the standards they themselves had created when they wrote “All men are created equal”. Problem was, the founders hadn’t meant what they’d written. They may indeed have “meant” the “men” part – because women were not equal in their eyes. But by “men”, they meant only white, Christian, land-owning men like them.

Then, to further demonstrate their preference for magical thinking over the rational enlightenment that had first inspired them, they decided that Black people were worth only three-fifths of a white person. What was that based on – other than a need to keep certain numbers in line? Slavery itself is based on a combination of magical thinking and economic bullying. At its bottom line, slavery is stolen labor. The slave master is getting the slave’s work output for nothing (minus the cost of clothing, feeing and housing the slave). So long as the slave’s work product far exceeds the cost of keeping the slave, from a purely economic point of view, the slave makes sense.

Imagine if you were the American South in the colonial period. You’ve got three great cash crops that could make you a fortune. The problem is, they require a ton of physical labor to get from field to factory. If the South had never had slavery as an option, if, instead, they’d been forced to pay a fair market rate for all the labor required to make them so economically viable – well, ya see where I’m going…

Take away slavery and the Confederacy never rises. Perhaps, in its place, a Worker’s Paradise would have arisen, but not a Confederate States of America built on the backs of enslaved Black people. There would never have been a “Confederate States of America” built entirely upon the evil institution of slavery.

For the record, every single Confederate state seceded from the Union over slavery. To the Confederacy’s credit, while having lost the war to defend slavery, they won the peace hands down. Slavery never went away. In fact, the real magical thinking here is that our gun debate ISN’T a vital part of our conversation about race.

Every single bit of our gun legislation is a dot connected to our history of racism. And racism itself is pure magical thinking – that any one tribe is better than the other tribes because of the amount of melanin in their skins. It’s the kind of logic only a racist could love – or take to heart.

There are plenty of reasonable gun owners. That’s not the same as “responsible” gun owners. That’s a total invention. Guns are death machines by design. No one can guarantee that they’ll never have an accident with their guns. What we call “responsible” gun owners are actually “gun owners who’ve been lucky so far”. Not quite the same thing.

I wonder still what THESE people need protection from? Still, at least their guns are extensions of their racism. That’s what so many guns are in America. They’re a statement.

Being pro-gun isn’t accidentally racist, it’s racist by design. Now, imagine if our news media wasn’t so easily bamboozled by this racist sleight of hand…