There is a sickness in the USA.
It’s a kind of lust.
An addiction.
A fetish.
It’s an irrational attraction to toys that end life.It doesn’t matter how many children shoot their siblings, how many people shoot themselves, on accident or on purpose, or how many disturbed individuals shoot swaths of others at once; the thirst for possession of murdersticks is seemingly unquenchable.
It doesn’t matter that you are statistically more likely to commit suicide than than to successfully defend your home from an invader. It doesn’t matter that accidents in the home are more prevalent than incidents of protection.
Statistics.
Facts.
Data.
Nothing sways the worship.
Lovers of the murdersticks scream about rights. They threaten violent insurrection should their toys be threatened by new regulations or by repealing old amendments.
They call laws that favor their mechanical idols “sacrosanct” and “immutable”, regardless of the fact that said laws are based on something called an “amendment”, which by definition means itself was once a change that was added and therefore can also be subtracted.
This desire is an attraction rooted in fantasy.
A fantasy not unlike the dream that one day, the fantasizer will find themselves alone atop a Nakatomi Plaza building, the sole force that stands between helpless innocents and an impending slaughter by an undeniably evil force that could only be stopped by the hero of the hour, that just happens to have their trusty war-wager holstered, locked, loaded and lubed up for action.
Ready and willing.
Never say die.
Yippie-Kai-Yay-NEVERgonnaHappenYouTwat.
More and more, this fantasy is being exposed for what it is; a child-like hero complex in an adult brain combined with a short sighted desire to shirk responsibility when confronted with the ills that this addiction causes society. While it is argued that unfettered access to high powered murdersticks equals freedom for some, it invariably means an unnecessary injury or an untimely death for many other innocents.
We should be on the side of the innocents.
We should reduce access to tools that create nothing but death and the aftermath of tragedy.
We should investigate the problem of mental instability among our populace, and we should start with the mental instability that causes the desire to collect, hoard, aggrandize and genuflect to the cold, steel, golden calf of casualty.