For a real treat, Google "Armed Jesus" and you'll see pages and pages of this garbage, including the same exact picture of Jesus with a dozen different weapons Photoshopped into it. I'm not kidding.
As a former Christian I find this disturbing.
Why is this relevant?
Because I saw this last night:
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), who was shot and badly wounded over the summer, complained the media did not often report the good news about guns.
That's why.
As I posted on Facebook last night "Am I the only one who hears "have you heard the good news about gun violence" in the same tone as "have you heard the good news about Jesus Christ?"
I've been going to write something, over and above my own Facebook post on the subject, about the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday night, but nothing quite came together...until this.
I've been saying for years that this Right-wing shit has become a cult. and the whole gun-humping thing goes hand in hand with that unfortunately.
I'm a gun owner, I currently own half a dozen different weapons, not all of which are used (I have no reason to shoot my Dad's reproduction Civil War .57 Caliber Enfield musket and the bruise it left on my shoulder when I last fired it as a younger and healthier man was persuasive enough not to give me another one now) and most of which I inherited from my Dad or my Grandfather. I used to hunt and target shoot regularly, now I just go when I can. I grew up around guns, my Dad was a civil war re-enactor and an avid hunter. I'm also a former NRA member, which goes hand in hand with the fact that I used to be a conservative and a Republican...in more than one way. A number of the old retired guys active in local Republican politics that I used to hang out with were NRA members also, one had been employed by the organization in his last few working years...as a firearms instructor.
I've also always, even back in those days, supported common-sense gun control measures...if grudgingly at times. I agreed with the original Assault Weapons ban passed under Bill Clinton, simply because I've never felt that military-style rifles were something that civilians needed to have access to. An awful lot of people that I've discussed this issue with felt the same way, including family members, some of whom were conservatives.
So, why, when we just had the worst mass shooting in modern US history, with 527 wounded, and 59 killed...that's right, almost 600 total casualties...600 PEOPLE...why is it that conservatives are so determined to deny, distract, and rationalize about the fact that this happened?
This is what I wrote a couple days ago:
As we're all aware, there was a mass shooting on Sunday night that resulted in a total of 586 casualties including at last count 59 fatalities. That is, almost 600 PEOPLE were affected by this tragedy.
Anybody who takes this as an opportunity to complain about anything Hillary Clinton or "The Left" is doing will be summarily unfriended, and you'll be damned lucky if I don't cuss you out first.
Firstly, they are out of power, secondly, it's just low class.
Jesus Christ, what the fuck is even wrong with people?
How many people have to die or be injured before we all recognize our common humanity and DO something about this problem?!?!
I'm a gun owner, on a general level I support the 2nd Amendment, and I am both a former conservative and a former NRA member. I have no desire to ban guns. So far as I know, I don't know anyone who wants to. However, If some additional regulations and/or harsher punishments for gun crimes will help deal with this problem I can support that.
Mentally ill people do not need access to weapons.
As far as I'm concerned no civilian needs access to military-grade rifles or armor-piercing bullets or suppressors, and I'm damned questionable about the idea of civilians having access to rounds like 5.56mm NATO standard that are optimized to kill human beings.
A 5.56mm round is not for hunting animals, it's for killing people. It's not much bigger than a .22 shell but that doesn't matter, because it is intended to fragment and do some very fucked up things to the human body.
You want to have that AR-15, get it adapted to fire .22 Long Rifle rounds like a military training rifle.
If you are so afraid of...whatever...that you feel the only answer is more weapons and/or more violence, just do us both a favor and don't talk to me.
If you want to take the latest tragedy and use it to air political gripes, don't talk to me.
We just had an attack on our people by some deranged and yes, WHITE, nut job that caused almost 600 casualties including 59 deaths.
No, he was not DAESH (or even a Muslim, or even religious so I've heard) or Antifa (his family said he had no real political affiliation) or even a veteran that was some kind of a mental case. This was an ordinary, except for apparently being well-off, plain old normal Old White Man.
If you want to be in denial about that, and about the fact that he was apparently radicalized somewhere other than an ISIS website, do it somewhere else.
If your first thought isn't "Damn, that's fucked up" or your ONLY answer is more "thoughts and prayers" crap? Don't talk to ME, because I sure as a motherfucker don't wanna talk to YOU.
If we don't act to make an effort to stop the violence it's going to continue and probably get worse. We are the ONLY First World nation that has so much death and violence, and while I suspect that problem is going to require dealing with a lot more than just the gun issue, we have to try.
Yes, people have a constitutional right to have a weapon, but people also have a right to NOT have to worry about getting shot while walking down the street and people have a right to abhor violence, just as much as I and a lot of other people have the right to understand that violence is wrong, but sometimes necessary.
More to the point, I was taught violence should be the last resort, not the first choice. I started out as a Christian, back when that word actually meant something.
And I'm sick of the violence.
This came about because a lady that I know, who is a ferret breeder and part-time NRA firearms instructor made a point of writing a post to bash Hillary Clinton's comments regarding the Las Vegas shooting.
I mean, on the one hand, when don't these people take an opportunity to bash Hillary Clinton, but the fact that doing so took precedence even over the usual "Thoughts and Prayers" bullshit told me a whole hell of a lot more than I wanted to know about that lady and I just decided I had enough, and I unfriended her, left her ferret group and then wrote that post.
But the real problem here isn't the guns, or at least, guns and their attitude about guns are a symptom of the real issue.
It's actually much worse.
What it really comes down to is belief in life as a zero-sum game, bug-eyed religious fanaticism, deviant interpretations of religious doctrines, small-minded fearful superstition...and the fact that there are just some people in (or willing to claim) American Christianity who never got over (or they never understood, and are thus dominated by) the origins of Judaism and later Christianity out of the same deep dark well of nasty Middle Eastern mythology that gave the world the same Caananite, Carthaginian and Phoenician religions whose gods we mostly only know because they are named as demons and devils in the Bible.
There are those who look at Abraham's preparations to sacrifice Isaac, and the various lists of sacrificial offerings in the Old Testament not as some outmoded form of transactions with the Almighty that was superseded by the coming of Christ, but as some sort of ultimate expression of faithfulness. Such leads to a belief in scarcity as sacredness, combined with their own entitled belief that they're entitled to resources, and some pretty bizarre interpretations of the Bible and human nature. These people in particular are intensely tribal in mentality, you can imagine what they think of modernity, much less science, and they are loud enough that just one or two of them can disrupt a church to the point where it no longer functions, unless everybody else gets together and decides they aren't having it. I've seen it happen.
At the last church I went to, we had this guy...Clayton...who couldn't wait every Sunday to regale the Pastor and anybody else who'd listen with his tales of arguing with Atheists and people who believed in Evolution. He wasn't trying to win anybody over, he just wanted to fight about it. More to the point, he wanted to be seen doing so.
That leads to another kind of bug-eyed fanatic...ultimately to those kind of Trump Supporters who just want to be seen giving the world the middle finger.
That guy? Almost everybody just rolled their eyes at him. Nobody really cared. Nobody wanted to hear it...and eventually he just went somewhere else. Unfortunately...it was just to another church in the same association where his viewpoint got more play.
Get enough of those people in an organization, and they push everybody else out.
These people, and the holy rollers and the prosperity gospel nuts? They dominate American Christianity in the era of Donald Trump.
They are all scared to death of their small, angry, fearful god and hiding under their beds and in their Bibles from terrors both real and (far more often) imagined, and they provide a fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root in and they all have guns.
To them, a gun is power.
When your "God" and the devil are indistinguishable save whose "side" you're on and you don't understand life, where life comes from, or the purpose of life...and often, the actual physical reality of your life is hard because (you think) people think you're an asshole (and even/especially if you are) well eventually, you start to think about death. Once you start thinking about death-and especially if you're a small-minded, fearful asshole to start with-then it's not a big leap to think that the ultimate power is not the creation of life, but the ending of it.
And what's the easiest way to end somebody's life? Guns.
It sometimes amazes me that we don't have more explicitly religious (Christian) terrorists. But then, that would require these people to get off the couch and stop watching FOX News.
We got a lot of real problems in this country right now, and Hillary Clinton and "The Left" ain't one.
A real big part of the problem is we have a lot of entitled white guys who want to sit on the couch and eat cake while still losing weight and somehow getting rich at the same time.
A lot of these people who take the path of least resistance through life? They think guns are their big equalizer against those more motivated, richer, or smarter than themselves.
My friend CJ showed me this Facebook post that attempted to justify price gouging and trickle-down economics using Jim the Plumber and Mike the millionaire as examples, there's a disaster and they walk into a store to buy the last bottle of water...which Steve the store clerk then sells to Mike the millionaire for $2,000. The post then posits that eventually, Mike's money somehow something something Ronald Reagan praise Jesus trickles back down to Jim without mentioning that by that point, if Jim hasn't gotten help from some government disaster relief agency he's most likely died of thirst.
My response? Yeah, that scenario only works out if everyone meekly accepts the terms of it, nobody decides to go without or otherwise not play, and Jim the Plumber doesn't pull out a gun, blast the other two guys in the face and walk out with his bottle of water.
And that, right there, is the problem. When people spend decades crunching up Pascal's Wager into powder and snorting it off stained-glass windows you get belief systems that don't work unless everybody plays by very specific, narrow sets of rules. That's why things, especially on the conservative side of the fence, are such a mess right now.
No matter how much firepower individuals or the State have, there are many ways for the other side to win. Insurgency is one, another is non-violent protest. When faced with a more powerful opponent you simply meet them on terms that are not favorable to that power. You change the rules of the game and in any conflict of any kind, the side that wins is not the one with the most firepower or resources or the best logistics, necessarily, but the side with the most will to fight and the capability to shift that willpower into effective action while operating from a reality-based framework regarding events.
Just sayin' this is probably all gonna go a lot easier and have a lot fewer casualties if random nuts don't have access to automatic weapons.
If it goes that way, the nuts aren't going to stop and ask you if you're a conservative or a liberal before they decide whether or not to shoot you, they're just going to do it, because the act of shooting you, and their gun? Those are the things they really believe in, and they want to demand of the rest of us that they have an easy life. All the talk about Jesus and conservative politics is mostly markers of tribal loyalty.
Remember, most of the victims in Vegas were probably conservatives.
That angry old white terrorist didn't care. He shot them anyway. As I also said, later;
I think that guy should be labeled as a Terrorist, for one thing. One doesn't need to have a "clear political motivation" to be a terrorist, some people are just nihilists, seeking to create social disruption and chaos. Some people are just angry, and want to get even with the world for some (most often imagined) slight or another. That might not be a political objective, but it's still an objective, that they seek to realize through terror. I would in fact argue that the politicization and racialization of the term "Terrorist" makes it less useful, but it's all we have at the moment. Also, and this goes back to my old-school conservative upbringing...if you need to be handed opportunities or have the world set up to serve you in order to succeed or feel good about yourself...then you didn't deserve those opportunities in the first place. Whoever is qualified or motivated enough to take advantage of them should be the one who gets them. The fact that a lot of the time that's NOT white people these days? Nobody's fault but white people's for not getting an education, or keeping pace with the times, or simply doing the easy work of rolling with social change on the (actually, pretty conservative) grounds that odds are, it's none of our business. Simply the fact that in my hometown, there's a lot of doctors whose names I can't pronounce very well and an awful lot of the rest are obviously immigrants...is not the fault of those people for coming and "taking" those jobs from some American. It's that those are the people who were willing to do the work and get the education to have that medical practice in the first damn place. If you want a free market, damn it that free market is going to go with the labor force it has, not the labor force some rando wants. These idiots want the world to serve them...but they don't want to do the work or have the leadership skills or maintain the good conduct and reputation that it takes to be real leaders in the first place. So, conservative white dudes ought not to be surprised that they're being replaced. Sometimes, when you stand in the way of history and progress yelling "Stop!" you're just gonna get rolled over, and I'm all out of sympathy at this point.
Doesn't matter if you vote blue or red, the blood's the same color either way.
The reality is that a lot of these people view their Self as God and their gun as the lightning bolts of that God, and if they have to, they'll invent enemies to smite. Maybe we'd do well to start giving them less powerful thunderbolts, just a thought.
The God and Guns thing is a symptom, yes, but it's a hell of a lot easier to get somebody to talk to you and actually deal with the problem if they can't just throw down and shoot you for bringing it up.
If we want our nation to continue to exist, we'd best start dealing with some of these problems. You can't bomb or shoot your way into having a better nation.
If we want a better nation, we have to be better citizens, and we have to stop living in fear and thinking force will solve our problems.
The real Jesus didn't have a gun and wouldn't have needed one in any case. What good are bullets against He who authored the concept of physics in the first place? Also, Firearms were not even invented for another 1200 years or so.
Maybe if more people understood those simple historical and theological concepts and really believed them, we wouldn't have some of these problems.
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