The pro-gun protest in Richmond over the weekend hit a lot of high points, including handing out 30-round magazines just because they could. Unsurprisingly, some people took issue with a lot of what happened, as if we actually cared what they had to say.
But it seems a guy cosplaying as Batman and trying to make a point earned particular ire.
See, there's a site called The Mary Sue. Ostensibly, it's about "geek" culture, but in reality, it's about leftist geek culture. There's literally never been an article at this site I've agreed with, and everything is framed as if everything should be about the extreme left's point of view.
There, they took issue with the Batman dude, and I'm seriously about to lose it here.
Another day, another round of Batman discourse. Over the weekend, videos from a pro-gun protest in Richmond, Virginia went viral on social media. The protest was against a proposal for new state legislation that would ban certain firearms and high capacity magazines — and one particular attendee caught people’s attention.
A man cosplaying as Robert Pattinson’s incarnation of Batman voiced his opinions on the issue to a local reporter, arguing that “people need to be able to defend themselves” because there isn’t an actual Batman around to do so.
“I’m here because I’m not actually a real superhero,” the man begins. “This isn’t real. People need to be able to defend themselves, because I can’t be there. There’s nothing like this that’s actually real. If they make it illegal for law-abiding citizens to own guns, criminals still have guns. It doesn’t check them. And I can’t be there to check them either. So, it’s important that everybody has a right to have a weapon.”
His comments were very quickly torn apart on social media… largely for how much he appears to misunderstand Batman’s actual stance on guns. Throughout his decades worth of comic appearances, Bruce Wayne has largely been against using firearms while suited up as his alter ego, largely as a result of his parents being gunned down in an alley in front of him. Despite how often his origin story has been retold onscreen, to the point of people joking about the visual of Martha Wayne’s pearls falling to the ground, people seem to gloss over the role that a firearm actually plays in the act, and how that would probably traumatize him going forward.
Now, as a geek myself, I understand drilling down into the minutiae of what makes a character tick and being kind of pedantic about that character, but while The Mary Sue has never had an issue delving into the politics of a situation, they've also never been above dismissing the reality of a character in order to make their point. Years ago, I wrote about one of their pieces, lamenting that Captain America didn't get into a gay relationship with his best friend, Bucky Barnes, for crying out loud.
So they're not above taking the character from its roots to make a point, they just don't like it when anyone else does it, especially when the person does it makes, you know, an actual point.
There is no Batman around. There are no superheroes who are going to swoop in to save the day. Hell, even in fictional Gotham, with not just Batman but the entire Bat Family protecting the city, people still get hurt or killed by street-level punks.
Batman doesn't tend to use guns, true, but he's got a wide variety of weapons he uses to take on bad guys. He's also fictional, so he's always just enough better than the thugs he's taking on, who also happen to attack him in just the right way so he can defeat them.
But the fictional superheroes aren't real, which was the dude's point. They're fiction, which means we're on our own.
The police can try to help, and most of them will do everything they can to help, but they'll always be in time to draw chalk outlines around bodies, but not necessarily in time to prevent there being bodies to draw around.
That's why we need guns. We need guns because no one is going to save the day for us. We've got to do it ourselves. That was the point.
In fact, if you go back to Batman lore, Thomas Wayne was unarmed, and he and his wife were killed because he had no protection. Hell, if you get a little deeper, in the Flashpoint timeline, when Bruce is killed in that alley, Thomas Wayne becomes Batman and most definitely carries guns, all because he didn't that night.
The Mary Sue, like most leftist publications, likes to cherry-pick when canon matters and when it doesn't. It's all about whatever's necessary to make their own political points.
