Fuck your guns. Let’s get that out of the way first.
Police in North Carolina are searching for a man accused of shooting a six-year-old girl and her father after their basketball rolled into the suspect’s yard. “
A man has been charged with second-degree murder in the US after he allegedly shot and killed a 20-year-old woman as the car she was in mistakenly drove up the man’s driveway.“
A man in the US state of Missouri has been charged with shooting a teenager who rang the wrong doorbell while picking up his younger brothers.“
Two high school cheerleaders were shot after one of them mistakenly tried to enter the wrong vehicle in a car park near Austin, Texas.“
BBC
A kid chasing a ball. A woman who made a wrong turn. A young girl getting into the wrong car by mistake. A boy ringing the wrong doorbell. None of these things are threats. None of those people deserved to be shot. The people who shot them had no need to be afraid if they took a heartbeat before reaching for their gun. I would argue that if none of the shooters had a gun in the first place then a) they might have used their brains to figure out that they weren’t being threatened, and b) innocent people wouldn’t have been injured/killed.
But that’s not tRump’s america. That’s not the NRA’s america. Their america is a world where they need to keep people in fear for reasons of money, power and influence. By instilling fear in the ordinary, by throwing hateful rhetoric at people who look, think, dress, or act differently they’re able to control their audience and keep them afraid.
And fear sells. It empowers. It isolates. It stops people from thinking long enough to consider what might happen if they don’t pull the trigger. Or own a gun in the first place.
Guns kill. More guns kill faster. The irony that the NRA managed to capitalize on the demonstrably-false fear that Obama would ban guns (didn’t happen) or Biden would ban guns (still hasn’t happened) shows that the gullibility of 2nd amendment fanatics is quite literally bulletproof. No truth, no fact, no statistic, no data is going to change the minds of people who want to believe that kids didn’t die at Sandy Hook, or that shooting first will never be the correct response to being confused or irate.
The funny thing is that NRA isn’t about freedom. It’s about money. It’s about influence. It’s not about whether Nanna and Grampy will survive a home invasion. Sure that might happen, but scores of innocent people will die first, and 28 states will defend the reflex to kill first and ask questions later.
Statistics show that states with stand your ground laws have seen a rise in homicides by 10% or higher [..] Data from the report showed that, when the shooter is white and the victim is black, the white shooter is 10 times more likely to have their actions deemed justified than when the shooter is black and the victim is white.”
BBC
Again, fuck you, fuck your guns. If you’re a real, thinking American you don’t need a gun to be free.