17 | April | 2013 | Existential Ennui

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As I write this, the votes have not yet been cast. It’s scheduled for a bit later in the day. It doesn’t look good. According to Senator Manchin, they don’t have the sixty votes that are now per-requisite for getting anything passed in the Senate. And Harry was so sure that the Republicans would be reasonable.

To be sure, there are Democrats signaling they are voting no. Their reason? Oh why should they stick out their necks when the House is surely going to ignore it anyway. Safer to placate their owners, the NRA than do the courageous thing, the honorable thing, the DEMOCRATIC thing–vote as their constituents desire. When 90% of the American public’s desires are being thwarted, you have to ask, what is this thing called Democracy anyway? A small minority is able to foil the desires and rights of the minority.

That is not always a bad thing of course. Our constitution envisions the protection of minority rights, but there are no minority “rights” here to protect. Here we have simple blatant greed which drives a small organization which pulls the strings of its puppets, so-called elected congressional representatives. The NRA, who are in fact beholden to business interests, and get their Congressional puppets to do their bidding.

The NRA wins– and of course a plethora of “patriotic” groups who are in reality nothing more than ill-educated macho types who have fallen in love as children with the idyllic mis-history of the “wild west” of old, and believe themselves to be “saving the country from itself”. They actually believe that their arsenals of semi-automatic weapons, self-created bunkers, bug-out plans, and caches of food will one day make them the Jeffersons, Washingtons, and John Adams of their day.

That they are delusional is obvious. That they are dangerous is both true and not true. They are dangerous to the average person who unknowingly lives next door to them, and may become embroiled in some “last stand” and caught in the cross-fire. They are not dangerous to the firepower and might of the US military, should that come into play in this future Armageddon that they have wet dreams about.

But the real joke is on them. And the NRA is perpetrator of the greatest hoax of all time. This institution, which started off as a means to help teach hunters how to hunt safely, and was assuredly in favor of not having guns in the hands of any but those trained to handle them safely, has morphed into a grand spokesperson for the gun manufacturers and gun sellers. That is who La Pierre and his ilk really answer to.

And they have done this job of theirs well. They have ginned up the rhetoric since before 2008 to assure their members that any day now a President Obama will take away their guns. They preach it with the fervor of a Billy Graham. They worry and threaten their members with confiscations and the demise of the 2nd Amendment. They rewrite the Amendment to mean what it never meant. They ignore their own–Justice Scalia–who informs them that the 2nd Amendment is not without restraint.

They do this, not because any of it is true, but because it causes what they want to happen–the pseudo-patriots race to the nearest gun location and buy up everything in sight. And get this–they do it at inflated prices. You better get yours before they are banned, and sorry, but our supply is short, so the price is twice what it was before all this happened. And the gun manufacturers of course, know better, and they are building them as fast as the shelves empty.

So now you pseudo-patriot, you can sit in your man cave, aka bunker, caressing and admiring your new arsenal of war weapons, confident that once again you have thwarted that Black Man in the White House. Yes, you are locked and loaded. And as the tragedy of Sandyhook retreats from memory and life returns to normal, you will forget that the NRA hoodwinked you and got you to buy up the store at inflated prices.

You will forget it, because you don’t want to feel like the fool you are. And because you are a fool, and you will forget, and when the next tragedy occurs, (and of course it will), the NRA will turn up the heat once again, and regardless of who is president at the time, somehow, they will make you afraid, and you’ll be headed back to the gun shop to load up on what may soon be illegal again.

Because, you see, poor stupid pseudo-patriot, they don’t care about the 2nd Amendment at all. They never have. They care about lining their pockets with dead presidents, and you are the stupid fool that keeps that cash flowing their way.

And the rest of us are just sickened by your stupidity. And we are sickened that we have to put up with people like you. But we do, for we believe in a free society.

But we will change this gun culture, and mark down the name of every single elected official who votes no, and all those who we know encouraged no in the hopes that they would not have to stand up and say NO publicly. And we will defeat you, and replace you with normal people of conscience who believe that they are there to represent the best interests of the people they represent and not corporate whores and their mouthpieces.

Shame on you. And may your children and grandchildren someday deny they ever knew you.