By Kevin Wilson
In the wake of the most recent mass shooting, Facebook is once again awash in a bunch of stupid fucking memes about how guns are evil or how they’re going to save us all from the immigrant ISIS Nazis.
Do us all a favor: if the extent of your willingness to get involved in meaningful debate on an issue that stands a very good chance of tearing our nation apart begins and ends with the Like button, shut the fuck up and go back to munching on paint chips. Regurgitated rhetoric does nothing but make me want another drink, and I can’t afford to support the sort of drinking habit I need to cope with this bullshit.
For the adults out there that are willing to sit down and work this out, let’s establish a few ground rules.
For starters, something has to give.
Despite a general downward trend in overall gun violence, it seems like we’re hearing about a mass shooting every other week. If the news is to be believed, we can’t go five freaking seconds without some psychopathic taint gobbler going and spraying bullets into a crowd. No matter how you look at it, it’s only a matter of time before public support for some kind of action hits critical mass.
And before you start in with the cries of false flag and conspiracy, please bear in mind the systematic incompetence of government on nearly every level. Anyone who seriously believes that the incompetent boobs who are currently doing their damndest to run our country into the ground are capable of executing a mass conspiracy to get our guns taken away by staging false shootings needs their heads checked. This ain’t a damn spy novel. I guaran-fucking-tee that some dumbass would have gotten wasted at a bar and started bragging about that shit within earshot of some soulless hack from TMZ by now if that was the case.
It’s also high time we accept that, no matter what side of the debate you fall on, you’re not going to have it your way. Period fucking dot. There’s a time to compromise and a time to stick to your guns (pardon the pun), and if you can’t figure that out, you have no business trying to argue the point. We are a nation built on compromise. Sometimes compromise makes you feel like you just took a big ol bite out of a turd sandwich, but that’s just the way things work. Chances are, some form of increased control is inevitable, and the best you can hope is to come up with a turd sandwich you can live with.
On the other end of things, cut it out with that “let’s pull an Australia” bullshit. It. Will. Not. Fucking. Work. There are more guns than people in the US, and the majority of them are in the hands of folks that would sooner start a civil war than give them up. You’ve got about as much a chance of banning and collecting all the guns peacefully as I’ve got of scoring a threesome with Scarlett Johansson and Judi Dench.
Now that that’s settled, let’s see what we can come up with.
The very first thing on any list made by people with at least room temperature IQs is to eliminate the idiotic gun free zones. As we’ve seen time and time again, a gun free zone is basically just a shooting gallery for psychopaths. We’ve also seen, time and time again, that armed civilians can stop an incident from becoming a tragedy. If you want to ban open carry in your establishment, by all means, but concealed carry hurts no one unless someone needs a hurtin’.
Next step: allow law enforcement to do their goddamn jobs. You can’t scream about police brutality out of one corner of your mouth and then whine because they can’t stop shootings out of the other. Give them the tools and the manpower to do the job they’re paid to do. Reward them when they succeed, and hold them accountable when they fail.
After you’ve got that nailed down, let someone to actually do the research and find out what will and won’t work when it comes to gun control. The fact of the matter is that our current laws are less than useless. They’re actively detrimental to the cause of reducing gun violence in many cases, and even the potentially useful laws are hamstrung by haphazard enforcement and criminals that can get around them through any one of about a dozen different methods that are equal parts Hannibal Lecter and Wile E. Coyote.
It’s kind of a big deal.
I’m quite confident that the best minds of our generation can come up with something that will work. It’s going to take time and money, however, and if you can’t keep your petty partisan bickering out of it, you’re not going to get any results worth a damn.
Once the experts come up with a plan, put it in place. Don’t scream about how it’s not enough or it’s too much. There’s no Goldilocks zone here. You’re not going to make everyone happy, and any plan worth the effort is likely going to piss everyone off.
Tough.
This ain’t about buying voters, it’s about keeping American citizens safe on American soil. That means making some difficult choices and maybe it’ll lose elections. So fucking what? If a politician is more worried about appeasing the unwashed masses than keeping them safe, they’ve no business holding office anyway.
Sometimes doing the right thing is popular, but most of the time, it’s not. That’s the price you’ve got to be willing to pay to bring about real change.
And make no mistake folks, change is on the way. It might be next week, it might be next year. It might even be next decade. One way or another though, it’s gonna happen, and we’d all do well to get out in front of it and make sure it’s the sort of change we need to keep our nation safe.