Former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shared at least one thing in common. Both had pictures surface of them wearing makeup to make them look like a minority, while representing parties that are very much against such things. They also managed to evade any repercussions for that by deciding to focus on gun control.
At that moment, the press that was hounding them suddenly lost interest in the scandal, and all was well with the two politicians.
It's proof that gun control can be a handy distraction from uncomfortable problems, and at least one person thinks our current gun control debate is more of the same, only instead of it being a personal scandal, it's something else.
You can’t get an MRI without a six-week wait, your insurer denies the medication your doctor prescribed, and the bill for your “free annual checkup” shows up three weeks later for $487.63 — but sure, let’s talk about banning rifles again.
That’s modern politics in America: when the system’s bleeding out, the government argues about the bandages. Gun control is the perfect distraction — cheap, emotional, and endlessly reusable. It costs nothing to propose, polarizes the public on cue, and lets politicians look like they’re “doing something” while the healthcare system quietly collapses under the weight of its own insanity.
Somewhere between the rise of $900 ER co-pays and $2,200 “bronze tier” plans that cover basically nothing, America quietly accepted that healthcare would be the most confusing, non-transparent, financially punishing system in modern life.
Health insurance today isn’t a safety net — it’s a second mortgage with paperwork. Families are paying premiums that rival rent, vehicles now cost what houses used to, utilities have doubled, and somehow the one industry meant to keep people alive keeps inventing new ways to send them into debt.
...Politicians know something most psychologists learned decades ago: when people feel powerless in one area, they’ll latch onto outrage in another. It’s textbook distraction — redirecting collective anxiety toward a simpler, more dramatic villain.
Healthcare is complex, messy, and humiliating. It’s endless paperwork, confusing jargon, and surprise bills that feel like financial jump scares. You can’t fit that chaos into a 15-second press clip. But “gun violence”? That’s a headline. It’s visual, emotional, and guaranteed to divide the public neatly into teams.
It’s not that gun control is their solution — it’s their substitute. When they can’t fix what actually affects everyone, they turn to what’s loud, visual, and politically useful. That’s how distraction works: it trades complexity for clarity, and it works every time because people crave something simple to blame.
It's an interesting take, to be sure, and there's a lot more over at The Truth About Guns you might want to read, but the overall idea that the push for gun control is a distraction due to the failures of the Affordable Care Act actually makes a fair bit of sense.
After all, it's not like we haven't seen it before.
Further, while one of the talking points during the shutdown was the ACA healthcare credits to keep healthcare costs down, it seems pretty clear that everyone knows that the system is jacked up and in desperate need of repair.
And it's summed up pretty well here.
While everyone’s arguing over AR-15s, the medical-industrial complex quietly absorbs another $400 billion in administrative overhead. While senators grandstand about “saving lives,” pharmaceutical mergers keep inflating drug prices by another 20%. And while social media users scream at each other about “gun deaths,” half the country is skipping basic healthcare visits because they can’t afford the deductible.
It's a real problem, and it's one that legislation created, thus legislation can actually fix. It wouldn't infringe on people's rights if structured correctly, but it's difficult, and it would require Democrats to acknowledge that Obama's signature legislative win wasn't the savior of the American people it was billed as.
Really, though, it boils down to the mainstream media allowing this to take place.
See, I get them being distracted by shiny objects. It's what the media does, and that's fine to some degree. Public attention waxes and wanes regarding various topics. Look at how things went with David Epstein, for just one example.
So giving them something else to focus on makes sense. The movie Wag the Dog is a fictional take on just how important being able to do that can be for any politician. This is just that same thing, to be sure.
But what pisses me off is that they keep returning to infringing on our right to keep and bear arms. There's literally a pile of other things they could focus on, but this is where they want to take things. "We can't afford for people to know we really screwed up healthcare, so maybe we can screw up their ability to defend themselves from the hordes who will resort to crime to pay for their loved ones' surgeries?"
I mean, that's kind of what we're talking about here.
But here we stand, and I can't say that whoever wrote this is wrong on any of it. I can't say they're definitively right, but this sort of fits what we've seen over the years from the anti-gun side, which is part of the problem.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment, as well as helping politicians cover up their own failures while doing so.
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