Author Stephen King is a legend in horror fiction. While I’m not a fan of his writing personally, a ton of other folks are. And while I don’t like his books, the movies made from them are really good, which means he knows how to create a great story.
And that’s what he does on X, formerly Twitter, when he opines on political issues he usually knows little about.
Yet he’s got a big following, so people pretend his opinions matter.
It seems his latest comment involved the Second Amendment.
Guns, Jimmy.
Guns. https://t.co/hx3hsECfCv— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 26, 2023
Of course, King is trying to pop off to pro-gun lawmaker Rep. Jim Jordan and make the case that Chicago’s problems are the result of guns.
It’s not unusual for him to take an anti-Second Amendment approach. He’s offered his opinions on gun control countless times and he’s most definitely not a fan of our right to keep and bear arms. In a free country, he’s more than welcome to his opinions, even if he’s this blatantly wrong.
But he does need to wake the hell up for a change.
Yes, Chicago has a problem with so-called gun violence. Yet King’s comments at least suggest that if guns were removed, Chicago wouldn’t have a problem.
That’s false.
Sure, people wouldn’t be getting shot, but only a complete idiot would assume violence would come to an abrupt halt.
As a novelist, King is someone who is supposed to understand people to some degree or another. As a horror author, he should understand that evil people will do evil things regardless of what tools are available to them.
If King were right and the issue is that the United States has such a high availability of firearms, then why is it that our non-gun homicide rate is greater than the total homicide rate of numerous other developed countries?
Just saying “It’s guns” is a cop-out. It’s an easy way to blame an inanimate object you don’t think people should possess for a very real problem. It’s not the guns. It’s people. It’s always been people. It’ll always be people.
And as someone who, at least in theory, tries to reflect the horrors of humanity in his work, Stephen King should understand that better than anyone. The fact that he doesn’t makes you wonder just how much cocaine he used back in the day.
Chicago has a problem. A lot of cities have that same issue, some probably worse than Chicago. Yet those issues aren’t guns.
We aren’t entirely sure what those issues are, though, because too many people have a vested interest in pushing the anti-gun narrative that we can’t even look at them. We can’t seem to get any scientific research into why people become violent and, perhaps more importantly, what we can do to try and prevent them from doing so.
From mass shootings to gang warfare, people are dying. They’re dying at the hands of people, not of guns.
Remove the guns, as King is implying he wants to do, and all you’ll do is shift the nature of the murders. You won’t make people suddenly get along and be best buddies. That will take a whole lot more and, for some reason, people like King don’t seem inclined to demand lawmakers do something about that.
Then again, considering the state of scientific research these days, we might just be dodging a bullet on that one.
Yet there were times in the past when that wasn’t the case. We could have trusted the research would be conducted and conducted in an unbiased manner.
Now, I figure the findings will just be like Stephen King’s–plucked from someone’s posterior to advance an agenda.
Still, King needs to wake up and recognize that there’s actual evidence that no, it’s not the guns and it never was.
