When I was a kid, Columbus Day was just Columbus Day. I wasn’t overly enamored with Christopher Columbus–mostly because the much cooler Vikings had been here first–but it was the holiday and I was just happy to get a day off from school.
Today, it’s a thing. Now, people want to call it “Indigenous People’s Day” or something.
Yeah, I pretty much roll my eyes at it, especially since it has so little to do with the Second Amendment, but I kind of couldn’t after coming across this screed.
Our recently celebrated (or ignored) “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” should not simply remind us that the violence visited upon Native Americans was the country’s original sin. It also provides historical context for the rampant violence now plaguing us across the nation.
We take solace in stories that claim America’s founding and expansion were rooted in European heroism and humanism. Even cursory research proves these accounts are largely canards, tall tales, and outright lies that hide very disturbing truths.
In reality, America was not founded upon the gleaming values of truth, justice and democracy. Contrarily, it is a product of a vicious settler colonialist process that mandated the noble explorers to, as Joseph Conrad wrote in “Heart of Darkness,” “exterminate all the brutes.” If complete annihilation was not possible or pragmatic, they granted the colored savages the great mercy and privilege of subjugating and “civilizing” them.
Long story short, America–and the West in general–is rooted in violence and as such, we’re completely and totally awful.
About what you’d expect in this day and age, to be honest.
If the author had stuck with this, I’d have probably ignored it. It’s just one of a thousand similar pieces you can find all over the internet. Unfortunately, he also decided to try and lump guns in with this.
We will grow increasingly numb to the mass killings of men, women and children on our own soil. Violence will remain the order of the day and local newscasts will provide bloody daily tickers of American murder, mayhem and body counts.
American politicians will unapologetically crush meaningful gun-control legislation. In fact, they will continue to make it easier to buy guns because of their greed, a perennial thirst for power and slavish devotion to the inhumane gun lobby. Yes, children will be gunned down and gun-toting Americans will continue to cry about their preserving their “freedoms.”
Oh, sweetie. You’re about to be up way past your bedtime if you think you’re going to play that game.
First, I want you to show me exactly which laws recently passed make it easier to buy guns. Just one. Go ahead, I’ll wait while you try and find it. I won’t wait forever, though, because that’s how long it will actually take for you to find anything.
It’s just not there. Yeah, I’m not happy about that, to be quite honest, but this isn’t about my feelings on the issue. This is about your complete and total mangling of reality in order to try and frame things your way.
Second, let’s talk about lawmakers’ supposed greed.
Now, I have issues with elected officials taking office without a pot to piss in and leaving office 20 years later as multi-millionaires. Something is indeed wrong there. Yet if you’re going to claim greed is the reason pro-gun lawmakers are opposing gun control legislation, you’re going to have to show your damn work.
Especially since gun control groups outspent pro-gun groups in the last couple of election cycles.
In both cases, groups donate money to politicians they believe will best advance their causes. They do this to help get them elected or to help them stay in office. This money doesn’t go into their pockets, either.
No one who makes this claim–the claim that pro-gun legislators are bought and paid for by groups like the NRA–has ever been able to show a single iota of evidence to actually back up this claim besides the same kind of donations made by every political group in the nation. This despite so much of the NRA’s dirty laundry being aired. If they were actually bribing officials, wouldn’t that have seen the light of day?
The fact that it hasn’t strongly suggests this claim has no basis in fact. Like, at all.
The reason these elected officials oppose gun control is the same as the reason I oppose it. It’s because gun control does. Not. Work.
Of course, what more can you expect from someone who frames our God-given, constitutionally protected rights in scare quotes? As this was on the internet, he’s free to say these things because of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Or are those “freedoms” too? How would he feel if the government swooped in and demanded he get a special permit before engaging in political speech?
Oh, that’s different.
No, it’s really not.
It’s not our “freedoms” we seek to protect, but our actual, literal, freedom. The fact that he can’t understand that makes it clear why nothing else he says should be taken seriously. And he’s a college professor, which is a blemish on the entire profession–and considering some of the stupid I’ve seen from professors over the years, that’s saying something.
Had he stayed talking about Indigenous People’s Day, I wouldn’t have cared. Instead, he strayed into waters he knew nothing about.
