Mike Leon has been a good friend to me and to the blog here since day one. He wrote a nice piece on guns, a topic he’s very passionate about, and he makes some solid points on how the public is being emotionally manipulated on the topic. Check it out and check out his Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One — urban fantasy thrillers.
I’m going to share an uncomfortable truth here. The Second Amendment wasn’t written for self-defense or hunting. The Second Amendment was written so everyday people could potentially assassinate politicians.
What brought this statement on? The current political inferno over gun rights on social media. Ever since Facebook rose to the status of foremost ideological gladiatorial arena in the Rome of American hyperreality, the dispute over American gun control has raged online in increasingly frequent intervals directly corresponding to each statistically insignificant mass shooting event. Despite the infinitesimal (and shrinking) likelihood of mass shootings or school shootings in the United States, media coverage of them seems more prolific than ever before. Schools commonly have drills to practice surviving an active shooter event. Lobbyists, children, nitwits of all ages, and politicians all demand legislative action. The internet is aflame with their cries.
Here are some numbers for you: 1 in 2,273,000. Those are the annual odds of your child being killed in a school shooting according to the Cato Institute. Your child is 3 times more likely to be struck by lightning. The annual odds of there being a bona fide Columbine-style bloodthirsty mass shooting at your child’s school are less than 1 in 100,000 according to these numbers from Northeastern University. The odds of anyone discharging any firearm at school, even by accident, even if no one is injured, are about 1 in 2000. You’re twice as likely to hit the Pick 3 lottery. I even calculated that last probability using dodgy figures from Everyday Gun Safety, an outspoken group of gun grabbers. If I were as snaky as the mainstream media I would post a headline like “Everyday Gun Safety Shows Americans are Twice as Likely to Win Lottery than Experience School Shooting.” That would be misleading, and misleading people is CNN’s job, not mine.
The point of those numbers is to show that school shootings are an outlier. They don’t matter. They’re incredibly rare, and making public policy decisions because of them is stupid. I realize that’s a cold and insensitive statement, especially to the tiny number of recently bereaved parents out there, but it’s true. If you called up your accountant and he told you he knows a guy who won the Powerball so he just put all of your money into the Powerball, you would fire your accountant. It doesn’t matter who he knows. I know a guy who drank himself to death twice and was resuscitated with the paddles both times. I also know a guy who survived a skydive when his parachute didn’t open. I’m still not chugging two fifths of Wild Turkey and jumping naked from an airplane.
And yet the debate still rages. Why? Because too many people put their feelings in the driver’s seat. CNN knows that. MSNBC knows that. Fox News knows that. If it bleeds, it leads, and they’re making a mint. Conspiracy theorists often claim mass shootings are government-run false flag attacks, but they’re failing to follow the money. If you told me CNN secretly hired mercenaries to shoot up a school, it wouldn’t faze me. It just makes sense. More dead kids = higher ratings = more advertising dollars. It’s not rocket science. They certainly have a more visible motivation than the government.
So the news media magnifies these events as much as possible. The bigger, the better. The higher the kill count, the more sweet cash they get from Pepsi, McDonalds, and Rosland Capital (I’m looking at you, Fox). Unfortunately, their over reporting is creating a false reality—a hyperreality—in which school shootings are common, and people want something done about this terrible threat to their children’s safety (which isn’t actually a threat at all). They take their rage into the streets…well, except all that Pepsi and McDonalds has them feeling kind of fat and lethargic, so they settle for making aggressive Facebook posts. #slacktivism
That’s how we got where we are—the point at which every other post is a screed about gun control one way or the other. They all make the same talking points.
This stuff goes on endlessly because no one can articulate the reason Americans need guns in simple terms. So I’m going to lay it down right here. It is about fighting tyranny, but not in the visceral sense that most survivalist gun nuts seem to cling to. It’s not about mowing down the jackboots that come to put you in a camp, or shooting down drones and helicopters. It’s not a Rambo Red Dawn fantasy. The truth is much more subtle.
It’s about fighting tyranny with fear. It’s about making sure every politician knows that we just might kill them. It’s about the Sword of Damocles. It’s about them having that lingering thought in the back of their head that the next thing in the back of their head might be a 6.5x52mm Carcano fired from a book depository.
We want them to think “If I ban violent video games, somebody might fire a .308 through my aorta” and “If we pass that abortion bill somebody might get angry enough to kick in my suite door and riddle me and my $3000 escorts with 9mm rounds while we’re in the Jacuzzi” and “If we vote ourselves another pay raise, somebody might nail me with an FN-Scar while I’m on the course at Martha’s Vineyard.” All of those things are in the realm of possibility because all of those guns are perfectly legal.
In the UK, politicians don’t have to have those thoughts, and now they’re throwing comedians in jail because they don’t like their jokes.
In the US, officials need more restraint than in the UK because we don’t need to overhaul anything. We don’t need an uprising or a rebellion to keep them in line. We just need one raving lunatic with a gun—and we let every raving lunatic have guns. He doesn’t need a reason. Maybe he wants to impress Jodie Foster. Maybe it’s just Monday. Who cares? When it’s over, we lock him up or give him the needle, and we look at all the other politicians with the same crazed-eye twitch that guy had, and we say it was just him. He acted alone. It happens sometimes. Nothing you can do about it.
That’s how we do things in America, and that’s why we need an AR-15.
Mike Leon is the raving lunatic responsible for The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One. The fourth book in the series, #Justice was just released in February.
Very well written (not that it will change anybody’s mind, but still…). The only point I’m curious about is the statement, “The odds of anyone discharging any firearm at school, even by accident, even if no one is injured, are about 1 in 2000.” I’m not challenging it, I’m just frankly curious. Does that mean that a gun is actually discharged, somehow, at one school in 2,000? Does that include schools that still have a rifle team (mine did, back in the dark ages of the 1960s)? It seems an awfully high probability.
I used the stats on Everyday Gun Safety’s website for that, and I believe their numbers go back to 2013. And yes, they include every gun discharge and have a listing of the incidents with descriptions. Most of the list looked like it was NDs or suicides.
Sidenote: My high school is actually on that list because a kid tried to kill himself in class (he survived). The local media beat his mom to the hospital so they could stick a mic in her face when she got there, and they repeatedly asked the police official in the following press conference if he was SURE he wasn’t trying to shoot the other kids. Was he SURE? Was he SURE SURE? They wanted it to be a “school shooting” so badly it was disgusting. I saw it live and it strongly shaped my opinion of the media.
From the attached image, it appears that Famed Crisis Actor David Hogg is still pig-ignorant on what constitutes an “assault rifle”. Perhaps he should consult his former-FBI Dad and handler in the DNC’s Tidepodder Crusade.
Mr Leon hits all the right points, and there’s this other guy who had something to say on this matter:
“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” — TJ
And he’s getting hysterically hisyronic. He also needs a good bitchslapping history lesson. Rwanda 1992. The Hutus managed to slaughter 800 000 Toutsi witj axes and spears under the eyes of the UN peacekeepers who basically wete disallowed to intervene. Only when they wete finally allowed to intervene the genocide stopped cold And this was when Yugoslavia was also going to war with itself
So I’d like to school him if only to see him turn into spluttrring jelly of rage
xavier
What a bunch of Alex Jones wackadoodle wannabes. Maybe you should harass the Sandy Hook families while you’re at it. Go ahead and fully fuck yourselves.
Easy there, Jackie Boy. We know you progressives and Cultural Marxists are high strung. It’s ok.
Now, here on the Roy Rogers Carbine, show us where the Evil Black Gun hurt you.
You’re as irrelevant and outdated as your references.
Thanks for the pointer to the Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One series. Bought the first one and I’m 80% through it and its terrific fun.
And that, by the way, is why we no longer need the Hugo or newsletters from “science fiction and fantasy” publishers or anything else to find good – very good! stuff to read.
Anyone who wants to read in this niche is going to go to blogs of their favorite authors – you, Correia, Day, Grant, etc. etc. etc. – and get as many referrals to other good authors as they could possibly need. And then buy up their entire backlist.
Jack McCoy on March 27, 2018 at 6:10 pm sperged:
“You’re as irrelevant and outdated as your references.”
The progressive and marxist thugs like you are the past, Jack-Jack. You aren’t Americans, and you don’t belong. Go find a country without a 2A and the other things that make you fearful. You obviously make a better slave or sniveling bootlicker. Freedom is too tough for Jack-Jack, so time for you to go home.
Does writing this make you feel better about living in your Mom’s basement, surrounded by all of your conspiracy-theory pin boards and your moldy Soldier of Fortune magazines?
Yeah, nothing is more American than telling another American that they need to leave the country. Or, you know, telling teenage mass-shooting victims that they’re crisis actors. He was there as his classmates died, you prick. Yup. You’re a true patriot.
Easy, Jack-Jack. Leftists have been preaching “Kill 2A” for as long as cowards realized eventually they’d crank the ratchet too far.
You aren’t an American if you don’t want 2A. Find a home that will take you if your fear is so great. Live as a slave, love your chains.
Totally Not a Crisis Actor David “Camera” Hogg is a Fake American. He can go with you and share your safety blanket. Franklin flagged the rights vs safety trade-off. You want safety, not freedom.
Get out.
Foam at the mouth much, Man-O Da Dumb Dumb? What’s it like being this stupid AND so full of rage? You’re like a redneck Hulk, but in the weak, scrawny body of a methed-out Alex Jones disciple, muttering “Pizzagate” over and over.
By the way, never once did I say anything about repealing the 2nd amendment, but actual facts do seem to be beyond your limited comprehension. Just like you can’t grasp that freedom and safety can—and should—coexist.
You know, you sure do talk about slavery a LOT, which is very, very weird—especially since it sounds like you would have thought the repeal of the 13th amendment was un-American, too.
Aw, Jack-Jack, don’t be all mad. No one’s getting upset — I’m all smiles. “Smiles, everyone, smiles!”
You’re having these projection fits — all raciss this, all ad hominem that. What the Progressive uses to attack is what he — oh, sorry — it — has in its heart. Poor Jack-Jack and — its — dark, dark heart.
Just helping you sort out your future life, Jack-Jack. And think, you can take all the Child Actors with you as well. When you move to your new Safe Space Country, that is.
Safety is your Goal, after all.
The God Emperor loves you, but he wants you to get out, too.
Oh, okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you’re a reasonable person who wants to have a nuanced, substantive debate.
* rolls eyes *