I'm a political junkie, which keeps me in a constant state of agitation. This would make me a masochist if it weren't for the fact that I was born bitchy. Following politics just allows me to share my natural gift with the public in a more focused way than would otherwise be possible.
For every ten US citizens there are nine guns, making the US the most heavily armed nation in the world.
40 – 50% of all US households own a firearm.
There were 13,636 murders in America in 2009. 68% of those murders were committed using firearms.
I couldn’t find statistics on how many crimes are stopped annually by armed citizens, but I can tell you that after two hours of searching, I found a whopping six examples over the past two years. That was after combing every whackadodle pro-gun site I could find. They celebrate those six miracles in perpetuity and hold them up as examples of why America needs to be more heavily armed.
I refer to those cases as miracles because they’re so fucking rare, relative to the gun statistics above, that they may as well be immaculate conceptions. And I’m fairly certain that I now have more tangible examples of an armed citizen mitigating a gun crime than any asshat that makes that claim.
I actually found more examples of shootings being stopped by an unarmed civilian, as we saw in the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.
In a state where a permit is not required to carry a concealed weapon, a 61 year old unarmed woman went after the shooter. Where were all of the gun toting tough guys? Why do they never seem to be around when you need them? This shooting happened at a fucking Safeway, so you can’t say that the place was exclusively filled with democratic pussies. Where were the John Waynes?
The heroes in this shooting were a 61 year old unarmed woman and a gay Latino. Suck on that, Trent Franks.
It always feels to me like NRA members have batshit crazy opinions about guns in America. Probably because the NRA draws batshit crazy lines in the sand. It turns out that Wayne LaPierre (head of the NRA) is a minority nutjob, representing people that aren’t so nutty.
Frank Luntz was commissioned by Mike Bloomberg to do a poll of NRA members last year. He got some fascinating results.
82% of NRA members and 86% of non-NRA gun owners support prohibiting suspected terrorists from being able to buy guns.
69% of NRA members and 85% of all non-NRA gun owners support background checks at gun shows.
Here’s the one where they lost me, but the numbers aren’t as bad as I would have thought them to be;
58% of all NRA members and 36% of non-NRA gun owners oppose a ban on semi-automatic weapons.
That one is a little nutty since the only use for an automatic or semi-automatic weapon, is to kill a lot of people very quickly. But the good news is that the NRA only has four million members so most gun owners in America are not NRA members and they’re not crazy.
Most Americans are for banning semi-automatic and automatic weapons. If Clinton’s ban were still in place, Loughner would not have been able to walk into Walmart and buy a clip with 33 rounds in it. He would have had to follow Sarah Palin’s advice and reload after firing off 10 shots. Does anyone besides Wayne LaPierre actually think that the ban wouldn’t have saved lives in this situation?
Sadly, I suspect that this will be another situation where most Americans overwhelmingly agree on something, but a lone asshole like Wayne LaPierre will override the will of the American people.
Someone needs to start an organization to represent non-extremist gun owners and non-gun owners alike.
Sarah Palin
Glenn Beck
Sharon Angle
Michelle Bachman
Rush Limbaugh
Michelle Malkin
Ann Coulter
Contrary to popular opinion, Sarah Palin isn’t illiterate. She’s just not fluent in English, but she’s extremely fluent in crazy. We all remember the “pals around with terrorists” and other vitriolic comments she made during the campaign. She’s gotten worse with her “reload” crap, complete with visuals of crosshairs on congressional districts (most notably, Gabrielle Gifford’s district). I’m not going to rehash and relink all of her violent rhetoric. I’m sure you’ve gotten an earful over the past few days.
I am of the opinion that words matter. And when you’re in a prominent position, you need to understand that you’re talking to a wide range of people from the sane to the batshit crazy. Sarah Palin doesn’t realize this. And what’s worse, she’s actually the whackjob whisperer. She speaks to, and resonates with crazy people in a way that few do. Not just crazies, but also the stupid. She’s the stupid and whackjob whisperer.
This gift is rooted in the fact that she’s crazy and stupid herself. This stupid bitch actually believes that God has chosen her for greatness, and she therefore doesn’t need to learn anything before she can be president. That’s why she’s not any less stupid today than she was two long years ago. Guess what Sarah, God didn’t pick you for shit. Bill Kristol used his penis as a divining rod and since you were the hottest republican woman he found, he picked you. There was divine intervention involved in elevating your status, Sarah. It just isn’t the kind you think it is. That belief that God “chose” her speaks to her crazy.
Everything else we’ve seen from her demonstrates the stupid. Her comical use of language, her ignorance that there’s a world outside of Alaska, and her general lack of knowledge about anything shows us that she’s an idiot. So when her spokespeople say (when speaking about he crosshairs map) that they “were never meant to evoke guns or violence”, I believe there’s some underlying truth there. Not that they didn’t mean to evoke violence, they obviously did, especially since the word “reload” was little Sarah’s mantra when she unveiled the map. But I think that the kernel of truth lies in the fact that Palin can’t understand that she’s inciting real violence with her language. She doesn’t get that she’s talking to a whole world of people that range from sane to batshit crazy. Am I being overly generous when I attribute her reckless behavior to stupidity more than to malice? I don’t think so. After all, this is the same stupid bitch that continues to preach “abstinence only”, despite the fact that this belief led her and her daughter into premarital pregnancy situations. This woman is utterly incapable of learning and understanding anything. And I really believe that in the rare instances where she does understand something, as she obviously did when she decided to take down the map, that knowledge will fall out of her dumbass head in short order. She will unlearn what she now knows. You can’t have lived on this planet for nearly fifty years and still be as fucking stupid as she is without having the proclivity to unlearn almost everything.
Moving onto Glenn Beck. He’s only slightly less stupid than little Sarah Barracuda. But what he lacks in stupid, he makes up for in hateful. Check out these little gems from pastor Beck:
He’s done his fair share to debase political discourse in America far beyond the point of merely being “impolite”. What kind of person listens to this bullshit every day? The kind that are so full of hate that they’re choking on it, or the kind that are just fucking crazy. Glenn Beck is among the most prolific whackjob whisperers in the world.
Here’s a little whisper from Michelle Bachman:
Nope, nothing that can be seen as incitement here!
Let’s not forget this little golden oldie from Sharon Angle:
I can’t imagine why anyone would ever interpret this as an incitement toward violence. Can you?
I can post video for years, but you get the idea. Every time someone speaks this way, they whisper to the whackos, “Hey, come in from the cold. There’s a home for you here”. Can each individual violent act by a nutjob be directly attributed to one of these assholes? No. Can you dismiss this speech as being irrelevant each time a nutbag shoots up the place? No, that would be inane. These people tug at the heartstrings of crazy. You can’t listen Bill O’Reilly (with a viewership of of over one million people) say the phrase “Tiller the baby killer” in perpetuity and conclude that he definitively didn’t contribute to the murder of Doctor Tiller. That would be fucking crazy.
These people don’t get to walk away blameless for Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting. And these people don’t get to diffuse their responsibility by claiming that the problem is equally prevalent on both the democratic and the republican sides. Here’s a lovely little compilation of hate from the right. This nutbag shot a democratic politician. It’s not hard to tell that he’s no liberal especially since Arizona has no shortage of douchebag republican representatives. In fact, most of Arizona’s douchebag politicians are republicans. The claim that he’s a far left wing nutbag is asinine.
You wanna know who else shares the blame in this shooting? Most of the residents in the state of Arizona. You guys love it when your politicians let their freak flags fly. When an extremist (and criminal) whacko like JD Hayworth forces his opponent to turn up the crazy in order to compete in an election, it’s your fault Arizona. It’s your fault for responding favorably to the crazy. That kind of nutbaggery doesn’t fly in New York or California. Just ask Carl Paladino, who had his ass handed to him in the last election. Or ask Meg Whitman and crazy Carly Fiorina, who had to run relatively moderate campaigns just to stay in the race in California. Crazy extremism in either direction doesn’t play in some states the way it does in Arizona. When the marijuana legalization bill was on the ballot on California, there were no politicians that were willing to support it for fear of being too left wing to be viable. You guys don’t insist on a moderate range that politicians must abide by in order to have a shot at getting your vote. And when the gap between someone that should be institutionalized and someone that is viably competing for a US senate seat in your state is as narrow as it is in Arizona, it’s your fucking fault Arizonans. Don’t kid yourself into believing otherwise. When you keep electing people like Jan Brewer and Jon Kyl, and you keep pushing John McCain into the arms of crazy, and you keep promoting conceal and carry laws in fucking bars, you can’t claim that there’s nothing wrong with Arizona.
I refuse to offer any absolution to the whackjob whisperers among us. And I refuse to accept false equivocations where there are none. Left wing whackjobs exist, but they’re seldom in a position of power or influence. Sure, I can find a dozen left wing crazies posting diaries on Daily Kos but I don’t know any of their names because they’re nobodies. Keith Olbermann is the most bombastic voice on the left. But make no mistake, he doesn’t even come close to the vitriol of the whackjob whisperers.
We’re never going to make strides toward minimizing these violent occurrences if we obfuscate or dismiss the people precipitating them.
