Seriously, just shut up. Nobody cares, you’re pushing low-information voters into the hands of fascists, you’re not going to save any children, and you’re wrong.

“But they kill people!”

Yes, who cares, shut the fuck up.

“But what about (insert mass shooting of the week)?”

Again, I can not stress this enough, shut the fuck up.

Wow, what a pleasant and productive conversation. But who is this imaginary person you’re yelling at?

Its everyone, everyone just needs to shut the fuck up about guns. Our time is too short, we have too much to accomplish, and if we don’t succeed then scores more will die than whatever heartstring pulling tragedy we’re reacting to this week.

Of all fronts to the culture wars, there is perhaps no battle less productive than the national conversation about guns. It is the immovable object of backwards, Army LARPing conservatives meeting the unstoppable force of spineless, hand-wringing liberals. No one is changing their minds, nobody actually can identify the problems that underlie gun violence, and it is a massive carrot on a stick moving single issue voters to Fascism. Figuratively, everyone is wrong on this issue. (except for me, of course, I was born with perfect opinions)

Those of us on the left (the real left, not Democrats) have a hellish burden in front of us. How do we convince the working class that our economic policies are not only superior for the global population, but a necessary step to survive the next few decades before Capitalism ends all life on Earth? A touch hyperbolic perhaps, but true nonetheless.

Our planet is dying, stripped of its resources, choking on our own fumes. The ice is melting, the seas are acidifying, our arable land will soon begin to dwindle. This ecological impact will lead to massive displacement, civil unrest, famine, and pestilence. Our peoples are enslaved, democratically elected governments are overthrown for mining rights. It unfolds right before our eyes. Worst of all, the select group of people who seek to profit off of this death, have complete mental control over a majority of our populations.

The problem is Capitalism. The sooner that mankind reckons with this fact, the sooner we can prepare for the inevitable collapse of our way of life.

Again, the only path for our species’ survival, is preparation and not prevention. We can not be prepared when the 100 individuals who dictate global policy value the capability to own thirty McMansions over the sustainability of the planet they’re built on.

The only logical conclusion, is to create a broad coalition of the proletariat around the concept of class solidarity. And the only way to crate this coalition, is to remove petty wedge issues that alienate large chunks of the working class. Do you see where I’m going with this? If not, please reread the title of this essay, and then proceed to kindly shut the fuck up.

We’ll come back to that, but first, allow me to indulge in my favorite pastime. Let me explain why everyone is wrong.

What Liberals Get Wrong About Guns

“Every gun confiscated will be used towards tickets for all Americans to see At The Drive-In reunite.”

Before Beto O’Rourke’s untimely exit from the 2020 Democratic Primary race, he attempted to carve a niche for himself. No longer content with being the guy who played with The Volta, the guy that jumps on tables, the guy who lost to Ted Fucking Cruz. He had forged a new identity, The Gun Grabber.

And on its face, I can respect the honesty. Facing the unimaginable tragedy of the El Paso shooting, coming on the heels of so many other highly publicized mass murders, Beto correctly identified a current in mainstream liberalism. Guns are terrifying, theres far too many of them, and they’re only used to inflict damage on people from afar. None of these statements are incorrect on their face. And frankly I can’t blame liberals for taking this stance. Because liberals are cowards.

And when cowards are presented with a problem, they will accept any solution that causes them the least amount of stress. Most liberals are not gun owners, I’m not sure most have even held a gun. Why would they? The urbanite has no real need for them, not much hunting to be had in their apartment complexes. You can’t take them into Starbucks, they cost as much as a Macbook. The priorities just aren’t there.

The only time a gun even enters into the liberal’s head-space, is in the context of dead bodies lying in a classroom or big-box store. And to be fair, theres been plenty of bodies to look at in the last few years. Tragedy strikes like a leopard, unnoticed until the violent, bloody end. Honest, hardworking families torn apart in a senseless explosion of lead and saltpeter. A mother weeping at the gate to an elementary school, a husband waiting by a hospital bed, teenagers broken by the lifeless gazes of their slain classmates. Gun violence is horrific not just because of the carnage, it warps the very perception of humanity itself.

Your neighbor, your coworker, the kid that liked Naruto for a bit too long. Any of these people could, with a relatively cheap purchase and a few days practice end the lives of countless souls around them.

The mindset of American liberals begins and ends at home. When they can place themselves into the blood soaked shoes of a child, or the grieving loafers of a parent at that child’s funeral, they demand action.

And of course, the only practical option, get rid of the guns. Like all liberal policies this seems reasonable. We license the ability to drive a car, make food, cut hair, sell lemonade on the street. It should be simple, utilize the monopoly that the state possesses on violence, to further enforce that monopoly onto the tools of that violence.

After all, it worked for Australia, it works in Europe. Their mass shootings are rare, filling our monthly quotas of dead innocents through a span of years. And realistically speaking, enacting similar legislation on guns in America would almost certainly reduce the number of mass shootings.

The only problem is, this isn’t Australia or Europe. This is America.

And due to our constitution and more importantly our culture, even the most reasonable of measures is a political non-starter. Liberals believe in common sense, that logical and well presented facts will alter the pre-existing conclusions that the general population has made. And while liberals will score higher on tests, get better grades, go onto better schools, and break into the coveted Professional Middle Class. This doesn’t make them smart.

Because a smart person would realize, just how dumb the American public is.

Americans, from a young age are taught that we inhabit a special place in the world. Despite the thousands of years that proceeded us, and our less than a century as the dominant global power, we’ve perfected the art of governance. Our Founding Fathers, not just a selection of wealthy landowners struggling to rule on their own terms, are deities and demigods. The infallible George Washington, the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin’s cunning wit. These men didn’t just have a great idea given the material conditions of the time, they were selected by God or fate to lead the world into a new era.

These men, that supposedly crafted such a perfect foundational text that no alterations or updates should be made hundreds of years later, also wiped their asses with corn cobs.

American society has been governed not only by hippo-teethed slave owners with shit in their drawers but by the unwavering undercurrent of anti-intellectualism. By the time of the Cold War, academia had been vilified as a hot bed of Communism.

The eggheads, they just don’t get what its like to be American. The information revolution of the 21st century only gave this poisonous mindset a lightning fast stream to infect the minds of its citizens.

So when the egghead says “Well the data shows that in Sydney their gun crime dropped at a rate of ….” The American mind defaults to its favorite canned response.

“Well, this is America.” Presented with no further context.

Therein lies the liberal’s greatest weakness. The expectation that everyone is going to play by the rules. But again, this is America, there are no rules. Not in political discourse or policy adaption at least.

No, our country is built on holy scripture. And in its commandments lie the words “Shall not be infringed.” This small phrase will immediately undo any fact based direction of national policy in regards to gun legislation. Despite the reality that those who wrote this screed would have never been able to imagine television, or drones, or Truck-Nuts, or Tacticool ARs decked out with rail attachments. Even despite the part about the “well regulated militia.”

But even if a genie shot forth from the lamp, and blessed the American populace with the gift of critical thinking, it wouldn’t give liberals the outcome they desire. Because liberals don’t actually care about gun violence.

Liberals are only inclined to ponder on the gun problem when a dozen children’s photos are shot across the screens of their gym’s TV. Liberals don’t care that the majority of gun deaths that occur outside of this dynamic. Because liberals only care about tragic deaths, not mathematical ones. Outside of the communities themselves, a liberal would never think about the actual victims of gun violence, poor, typically non-white people in our inner cities. Despite the body counts and frequency being much higher.

At the risk of exposing myself as one of those guys allow me to quote The Joker.

If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan’ Da Joker, Baby

When a black teenager gets gunned down outside a bodega in Chicago, the Betos of the world will never even hear about it. And if they do, it’ll be presented as gang-related. Oh these aren’t people, they’re drug dealers. This is a part of their world, and therefor, a part of the plan. Gun violence only exists to liberals when its a white child in a safe neighborhood. Because thats where they live. And if someone at a concert in Las Vegas or a club in Orlando isn’t safe, then how protected are they?

The liberal will never have to worry about whats happening in some shitty part of St. Louis. They’ll never go there. Their children won’t be settled into one of their underfunded schools, forced to walk home to an empty home because both parents are at work. The Gun Grabbing is always framed around “military style assault weapons” rather than the actual tools of this violence, a simple handgun that one could get for a few hundred bucks off the street.

Liberals prefer gun grabbing because it allows them to feel like activists, without having to put in any legwork or sacrifice. They don’t own guns, so its a simple solution, just get rid of them.

Which betrays the most disgusting thing about liberals, they will take no steps to see how their own actions actively kill people. Liberals can not think past simple cause and effect. Gun shoot bullet, bullet kill child, gun bad.

A liberal will never ponder on the societal conditions that breed this violence. Liberals can’t fathom that decades of redlining and NIMBYism have pushed marginalized communities to the point where crime is inevitable. The school you voted to under-fund, the rec center that would be a blight on their property value has no weight on their world view. When people are backed into cages, be not surprised when they act like animals. A liberal wouldn’t consider that the destruction of the social safety net erodes the natural protections communities can place against violence.

Because that would require the liberal to turn the camera in on their own lives, their own comfort. And liberals require comfort to support their worldview. What if your property tax rate was marginally increased to benefit poor, possibly brown children? Lunacy, this is America, I shouldn’t have to care about my neighbors.

If liberals actually cared about dead children, they’d stop killing so many.

And so when a liberal tries to explain that their simple, common sense solution to gun violence merely requires a complete overhaul of the US constitution, its economic structure, and the racist laws that keep it in check. There is only one valid response.

Shut the fuck up.

What Conservatives Get Wrong About Guns

Just about everything else to be honest.

While the liberal mindset is predicated upon maintaining the level of comfort they’ve come to expect. Conservatives live in a world of unearned fear, despite their own plushy existences. The liberal has a child’s understanding of how to solve problems, the conservative possesses a baby’s grasp on the threats. Ask a conservative why they need guns, and you’ll get one answer with a few variations. They need it for protection.

Protection from either the state, or from their fellow citizens. To the conservative, everyone is that isn’t a cop is a criminal. One only needs to peruse the covers to gun magazines to illustrate just how this fear permeates their entire worldview

“Hello 911? My parents have been awake for three days and are shooting at the shadow rats”

Whenever a mass shooting occurs, the first thing a conservative will say is how it wouldn’t happen to them. No sir, they’re prepared. They’ve been practicing, both at the range and in the warped confines of their mind. To a conservative, gun violence isn’t just relegated to the inner cities with the occasional large event. It is a constant, unwavering threat. Their workvans, the neighborhood grocery store, the small homogeneous communities that have never seen the sort of terror that they would gleefully enact.

The amygdala of a conservative is in constant overdrive. Fueled not only by their own imaginations, but by their media, news, and advertising. During the past thirty years, Republicans have developed their own Expanded Universe of sorts. Its quite similar to the reality that we all live in, with a few details changed. One of the biggest details, is that violence can and will erupt around them at any time. To a conservative, crime, especially violent crime, isn’t the result of sociological or economic factors. Its just a thing people do spontaneously due to the crime gene. (related to the skin color gene perhaps? Just asking questions.)

And a massive part of the conservatives mental space is filled by randomly generated short stories of good triumphing over a spontaneous threat. You’re at the grocery store, when suddenly Al Qaeda, ISIL, and Jane Fonda arrive. What do you do? Kill them with the effortless skill that you’ve seen Harrison Ford do a thousand times of course. Easy peasy really.

If you have any conservative friends on Facebook, this is evident in the memes they share.

Okay Shooter

The conservative brain not only fears random violence, it craves it. Knowing that living in a society requires certain standards and practices, having all their toys lined up just in case they actually get to kill someone is a necessity. So by asking them to have less guns, you’re not only exposing them to a threat, you’re ruining their chances at justified murder.

Republicans have a hard time with statistics. They claim to need a gun for the slim chance of self protection, but ignore the real hard data which suggests that gun is more likely to kill themselves or their loved ones. But the conservative mindset isn’t based on facts, its based on narrative. And the narrative is, if you don’t own a gun, you can’t kill the nine suspiciously melanated felons who want your TV and wife.

And in way, I can’t really blame this flavor of gun-nut. With how violent crime is over represented in media, despite being on a downward trend. Its no wonder that a person who’s driving emotion is fear would want to protect their loved ones and property. They are products of the Self Defense Industrial Complex.

Gun manufacturers sell more guns when people feel threatened. They have spent decades crafting the narrative that one is not only under constant threat of violent assault, but that Obama himself could sweep in at literally any moment and snatch that Sig Sauer right from under your nose.

And this leads to the other flavor of American Ammosexual, the freedom fighter. Not only content to be on the ready to shoot a fellow citizen, they are also prepared to fire upon cops and soldiers.

Regardless of whatever political party has control of the federal government, the threat of jackbooted thugs stripping Americans of their god-given right to self defense looms large. This is the person convinced that they need their guns, in case guys with guns, come to take their guns. Which is absurd on its face, and crumbles the second a bit of scrutiny is applied.

If no serious action to limit ownership of firearms was taken after Sandy Hook, then it will never happen. When the power of a Political Advocacy Group / Advertising Collective outweighs the corpses of elementary school students, you know the ship has sailed. So all subsequent calls of “They’re coming for your guns” rings hollow. Except to those in the target market demographic.

When the government does decide to start killing undesirables, its not going to be the gun-owners. Because all armed wings of the state are already filled with the same people they’d be attacking. Both the military and police have been invaded by right wing extremists over the years. The bible thumping, gun fellating, Black Rifle Coffee slurping chuds exist in a state of superposition. At once kicking down the door, while simultaneously having their door kicked in.

Its incredibly telling that of all the heinous crimes that a government could commit, the only one that provokes fantasies of violence is having ones toys snatched away. The eradication of social services, endless foreign military conflicts, and the modern day slavery of the prison system are either unimportant or worthy endeavors. Only the imagined threat of gun grabbing is worthy of revolution.

So when some boogaloo boy with a Thin Blue Line t-shirt claims to need these weapons to kill his alleged brothers in arms, we relapse to the refrain.

Shut the fuck up. Also being into beards, whisky, and black coffee is so 2012. Get a new shtick.

But What About The Coalition of Broads?

Well it was broad coalition, but I like your idea too.

Imagine the next few decades like a Trolley Problem. On one set of tracks is the continued existence of our species. On the other is a handful of dead children every few weeks. We must choose.

Due to the impending collapse, we are not allowed another choice. We on the left need the support of the gun owning demographic. And by fueling the right-wing propaganda that everyone on our side is a gun grabber, we inadvertently funnel a massive chunk of the working class right into the hands of the billionaire ruling class.

Universal Healthcare, democratically controlled workplaces, self-determination, a fulfilling life, economic and environmental justice. These are routinely supported across ideological lines. These are the policies that can unite the proletariat, to lead to the militant labor forces necessary to defeat our enemy. And our only enemy is Capital.

Liberals are correct in the sense that the American cultural zeitgeist is a terrifying swamp of violence and misery, but can’t see that its the weapons manufacturers and cynical right-wing politicians who guide the discussion. Not average gun-owning proles.

Conservatives understand that any equalizing force between the state and it’s constituents must be protected. But fail to realize that their own delusional worldview lines up perfectly with the government’s motives and actions. They are under no threat, and yet still must protect themselves.

The damage has been done to our culture. And the only mitigating factor to combat our violent selves is support for the communities affected, not to retroactively alter the course of American psychosis. The guns are here, and they’re not leaving.

Treating the right to responsibly own an operate firearms as a left-wing value is a net gain to our movement. It puts a major crack in the psychological conditioning done towards the right-wing. Sure, guys like Beto and Mayor Pete want to take your guns. Marx just wanted you to point them at your boss, not your neighbor.

And with that, I’ll shut the fuck up now.