True fact: 95.7% of all mass murderers are male. That’s probably not a coincidence since U.S. men are roughly twice as likely as U.S. women to own a gun, 43% vs. 22%. Why is that, do ya suppose? Is that because US men fear for their safety more than US women? Why do American men feel so much more compelled to have a gun in their hand as they walk through life? Is there a connection between the bullets in their guns and the testosterone in their swagger? Here in America, gun culture and male culture share more than just spit. Why, some American men wave their penises around just like they were guns. And, strangely, some even use their sperm just like bullets.
America’s gun laws aren’t like anywhere else. When the people who wrote or back the gun laws try to explain them? The smell of bullshit wafts up immediately. All this “protecting home and hearth” rings extremely hollow in our contemporary world. And don’t give us that “rural folks are different!” crap. People live rurally all over the world. Only in America are they armed to the teeth and ready for literal battlefield combat.
That’s not a rural neighborhood being paranoid, it’s the racists who live in that rural place. They see their part of the population shrinking rapidly while every other group’s percentage grows.
White Fright
What’s a white guy gotta do to compete in this world? The problem is, white guys don’t want to compete even with themselves.
The SCOTUS killed affirmative action dead because it advantaged Black and brown people on its way to leveling America’s playing field. The reason our playing field is so un-level is because white people have had every last advantage up till now! What is a legacy admission other than affirmative action by another method?
White power wants us to keep handing them money and power without question, just as we always have. That we’ve suddenly dug in our heels and resisted has unnerved white power. Donald Trump didn’t change the GOP’s course, he sped up their process and progress toward the end they always wanted: permanent one-party rule.
And they’re the one-party.
A Great Idea Poorly Executed
The truth is we’ve always been a great idea (human self-government) poorly executed. Our founders didn’t actually believe that “all men” were equal. They certainly didn’t believe women were equal to men. That immediately compromised their efforts. Good thing our founders baked a fix into the process.
Cutting a deal with slavery at the jump was always going to cause us trouble. At its bottom line, slavery is stolen wages. The South’s three main cash crops – the basis for the Confederacy’s entire economy – were tobacco, sugar cane and cotton. All three are labor-intensive. Imagine if the South had been forced by circumstances to pay a fair market rate for every bit of the labor that slavery provided gratis.
The Confederacy would never have risen as it did. Instead, it might have become the world’s first Worker’s State.
Slavery isn’t entirely free. The slaver has to cover whatever it costs to clothe, house and feed their slaves. We can assume that the costs were negligible compared to the profits to be made. That’s why slavery persisted and it took a Civil War to effectively end it.
America’s gun laws owe a lot to slavery. In a lot of ways, our gun laws are an extension of slavery (and slavery’s endgame). Just as policing in America began as slavery’s enforcer, our gun laws became the enforcer’s enforcement.
One-Sided, Racist Gun Laws
Adam Winkler, writing in the Harvard Law Review in 2022 pointed out that “The founding generation that wrote the Second Amendment had racist gun laws, including prohibitions on the possession or carrying of firearms by Black people, whether free or enslaved. A Florida law in 1825 authorized white people to ‘enter into all Negro houses’ and ‘lawfully seize and take away all such arms, weapons, and ammunition’.”
I betcha if Black people were all ardently pro-gun, armed to the teeth and openly hostile toward white people, white people would suddenly be intensely pro-gun control.
Controlling guns shouldn’t be foreign to gun lovers like the NRA. Teaching gun safety used to be the largest part of their purpose! They didn’t used to shill for the gun manufacturers. Somewhere in the early 70’s, racism took control of the organization. They stopped caring about gun safety and focused instead on selling as many guns as they could – mostly to white people.
Meanwhile, the abortion debate was turning sperm sacred.
Religious Cynicism
Evangelicals, born-agains and the rest of the Protestant religious right didn’t used to care about abortion. In fact, they all used to be for it. In the 1950’s, those groups used busing as their fundraising boogeyman. Don’t forget, the religious right had used the Bible to justify slavery. They’ve always been racist at their core.
The moment SCOTUS took busing off the table, the religious right were forced to find another reason to play the victim. Say what you will about the Catholic Church, at least – on the subject of abortion – it’s been consistent. Consistently wrong, but consistent.
When busing stopped working as a fundraiser, the religious right decided to hold their noses and join with the Catholic church in opposing abortion and birth control. It was a deeply cynical decision then. That pool of cynicism has only gotten deeper and more dank. The process by which Catholics (Scalia, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Barrett and Alito) hijacked the SCOTUS is a story in itself.
It was a process, deliberate and calculated. The goal always was to kill Roe. That SCOTUS got to kill Affirmative Action, a ton of climate regulation and further empower money in politics? Icing on the cake!
Shooting Loads v Shooting Bullets
In half of America now, a rapist’s sperm has more rights than the rapist’s victim.
America is only just starting to deal with harm misogyny has done us. Our founders, don’t forget, believed only men were “equal”; and, by “men”, they meant only white, Christian, land-owning men like themselves. America has always been a little penis-centric. Maybe a lot penis-centric.
Tens of millions of Americans – male and female – voted for a man who openly confessed to sexually abusing women. Hell, he bragged about it! What a delicious pleasure it will be when E. Jean Carroll kicks the financial crap out of Trump in her defamation suit, part two. Trump – the “sperm as bullets” mascot – cares far more about paying from his own pocket than almost anything.
I suspect that even if Trump loses his freedom, he’ll end up in some gilded cage. Better that he sits inside it knowing he’s flat broke, too. That will be the thing that gnaws at him until he sputters out.
We get it, boys! Shooting loads and shooting bullets both deliver a special kind of “feel good”. They’re both powerful and satisfying and powerful some more.
Unfortunately for you, the rest of us have finally found the will to stop this madness – and we will. By the time we’re done, you will keep your peckers and your popguns in your pants.