Last time, I threatened to torment you with an additional post regarding another one of Amanda’s latest columns in Salon. It was just too awful not to say a few words about it. So let’s get the pain out of the way.
This one from Tuesday concerns Christmas again. And guns. And dildos.
Sorry, America. Not dildos in a fun way. Dildos in a vapid way. I’ll get to that in a bit.
Right out of the gate, Amanda offers a true statement, but then follows it with something obtuse. Her first sentence was, “Rational debate over guns in this country is clearly impossible.”
Got that right. But she follows it up by linking to a short Rolling Stone piece she wrote a couple of months ago where she tried to say that people are sick of hearing arguments…
…that guns don’t kill people–because the reasons people commit murder are irrelevant and all that matters is that we figure out how to grab the guns;
…that good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns–in which she pointed out that no mass shootings in the past 30 years have been stopped by an armed civilian…though her source (Mother Jones) uses incomplete data and more restrictive criteria than she did, and she didn’t mention that mass shootings often take place in “gun-free zones”;
…that the mental health system must be overhauled–because knowing who is mentally ill won’t help us to figure out who will be the next perpetrator of gun violence (so she admits that mind-reading isn’t possible yet);
…and that gun ownership is a constitutionally-protected right–because slaveholders with muskets wrote the Second Amendment, she stated, channeling Piers Morgan.
So yes, with that sort of logic, it’s no surprise that we can’t have a rational debate on guns.
In Tuesday’s column, Amanda described Second Amendment supporters as gun nuts more than once, just as she described supporters of preserving the meaning of Christmas as right-wing nuts in her column from the previous day. She really has a problem with nuts. Self-loathing can be destructive, Amanda.
She said conservatives have elevated guns to a religious status. Or no. To be exact, she said that Republicans have raised guns to the level of a religious icon so as not to offend gun worshippers, while conservatives have raised guns to a “near-religious” status. “Sooner to say something blasphemous about Jesus than the mighty firearm,” she believes.
She has those nutty conservatives and/or Republicans nailed, doesn’t she? Sooner to say something blasphemous about vaginas, abortions, birth control, gay marriage, criminals, the alphabet soup of self-identities, and Islam than Christianity or the Constitution.
Amanda told her readers that guns have no practical use and that people buy them mostly as a way “to signal social status.”
Does Facebook have a “Status: well-armed, so don’t even think about it, @$$#*!&” option? I wouldn’t know, I’m not on Facebook. Probably not, since it’s Facebook.
Here’s where Amanda really got her unhinged groove going:
Ordinary, law-abiding citizens in the 21st century have very little practical use for guns. Most of us don’t hunt and the much-vaunted self-defense value of guns turns out to be poppycock. The average gun sold in this country will either be used to do something terrible and/or illegal (shooting an innocent person, being used in a crime, suicide), or, in the best case scenario, it will have a mundane existence, used only to shoot paper targets and nothing else.
Most of “us” enlightened 21st-century folks aren’t hunters; therefore, guns are impractical, Amanda writes. In other words, guns aren’t made to be used. Note how she first says that the “average gun sold in this country” will be used for bad things then in the “best case scenario” would be used for nothing more than target practice.
Best case scenario? Try overwhelming majority case scenario. Nearly every legal gun owner in America hopes they will never have to use a gun on another human. Amanda simply cannot comprehend the concept that the millions upon millions of ordinary, law-abiding gun owners would rather own a gun and never have to use it than not own a gun and find themselves in a dangerous situation where they wish they had one.
She’s well aware that there are at least as many guns in this country as there are American citizens, which she pointed out in her October 1st Rolling Stone piece. She cited a 2013 Pew survey that determined there are between 270 and 310 million guns in America. Five days after Amanda’s RS column was published, the Washington Post figured there were around 357 million guns in America.
So let’s say that the Washington Post’s numbers are accurate. Higher number of guns means scarier number, right? Time for another math lesson for Amanda and the other anti-gun fruitcakes.
There were 8,124 murders by firearm in 2014, according to the FBI. There are 357,000,000 guns in America, per WaPo. If we were to assume that of those 8,124 murders, one person only murdered one other person using one gun (which we can’t assume in instances of multiple homicide since most perpetrators of such acts use no more than one or two guns), the percentage of guns in America that have been used to kill is…0.0023.
Where is the greatest per-capita percentage of these firearm-related murders taking place? In heavily-populated cities controlled by Democrats. Not exactly strongholds for conservatives. And how many of the guns used to commit those murders were acquired legally? No one can say for sure. PolitiFact recently tried to answer the question but couldn’t pin down a proper estimate. They note a 2004 federal survey which found that 40 percent of criminals acquired their guns through the black market or by stealing them. There were many other variables to consider, so the actual number of murderers who bought their guns illegally is likely much higher.
A study by the University of Chicago released in March showed that over half of American adults in rural communities own guns, while a much lower proportion of the urban adult population–less than a fifth–own guns. A 2013 Bureau of Justice Statistics study reported that nonfatal gun violence is about twice as likely in urban communities as opposed to rural communities.
I find it stupid that I can’t readily find anything similar regarding fatal gun violence statistics, but it’s commonly regarded that firearm-related homicide rates are more common in urban areas. A few days ago, Slate helped publish a map of where every shooting injury and death took place in the U.S. over the last year (including officer-involved shootings), but the map backfires on the message (oh lookie, a pun) because it shows that the most dangerous areas are in America’s more populous areas, especially in inner cities where fewer people legally own guns. If clear-headed people were to view the gun-related homicide rate in rural areas of America, they would would find that it might resemble the rates in highly lauded, more civilized countries they like to mention, such as those countries in Europe that are so much more awesome in every way than America.
Yet for some reason, Europe isn’t facing an American refugee crisis. Go figure.
So no. More gun owners do not mean more deaths. The culture of guns in the two types of communities plays the main role. In rural areas, criminals fear armed civilians. In urban areas, unarmed civilians fear criminals. In comparison to the big cities, a whole different mentality exists in rural communities regarding guns, violence, social bonds, traditions, and a host of other aspects. It also depends on the part of the country where someone lives. I’m guessing most Southerners sleep soundly at night knowing they have a weapon at the ready, while some uptight Yanks lay awake in bed fearing what the inanimate object will do next.
About the self-defense claim, Amanda linked to a list of agenda-driven Harvard studies from eleven years ago or more that attempt to discount the self-defense arguments in non-mass shootings. I’m not linking to it.
Coastal, big-city progressives like Amanda, a conceited sort who live in their bubbles of intellectualium, have no clue how the “other half” lives because they don’t bother to look at it other than down their little upturned pug noses. They see people killing other people everywhere on their unpopular news cable channels and internet echo chambers and in their floundering newspapers, so they believe that something must be done and they are the ones who can fix it. The most simple solution in their minds is to get rid of the thing about which they know so little but think they know everything–guns.
Amanda thinks that guns are useless for people “who have no intention of shooting up a school or knocking over a convenience store,” so there is “no doubt why the number of gun owners in this country has dwindled down to 1 in 5 Americans.”
Oh, no doubt! Just 1 in 5? That’s all? That’s, like, hardly anybody! Only around 50 million, if we’re just counting adult Americans, which we are. Except she’s referring to the same University of Chicago survey I mentioned earlier, and it stated that the percentage of gun owners was 22.4 percent in 2014, a little higher than Amanda wrote. Almost 1 in 4. Let’s compromise and say 1 in 4-1/2. The 2013 Pew survey said the percentage of Americans who are gun owners was 24 percent, which is even closer to 1 in 4. Also, Gallup asked people as recently as October about their gun ownership status. 28 percent of respondents told Gallup they personally owned a gun. Now we’re getting close to 1 in 3 territory.
When these surveys account for adult Americans living in households with guns present, Pew in 2013 found the number to be 37 percent. In the 2014 University of Chicago survey, it was 32.4 percent. And Gallup’s October 2015 survey said the number was 41 percent, with another 2 percent saying a gun was located elsewhere on the property. So 43 percent of American adults could very well have at least one gun close at hand. That’s a mere 105 million Americans. It’s a miracle our amber waves of grain haven’t turned to crimson killing fields reminiscent of Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia, drowning America in a sea of blood…although that’s what the gun-grabbing proggers want you to believe, even as murder numbers–involving and not involving firearms–have been sinking since the 1990s.
Remember–8,124 murders involving firearms in 2014. That means 0.0077 percent of American adults have murdered someone else with a gun, if we’re talking about only one adult with one gun killing one other person.
Number of guns that have killed humans? Zero percent. I know Amanda hates it when gun nuts say that.
Where was I with Amanda’s column? Oh, yes. We haven’t even gotten to the part with the dildos yet.
Before that, she offered a couple more ignorant assertions about gun owners. She thinks that the real reason those in “right-wing circles” buy a “bunch of guns” is because to own and show your guns to others “is a way to signal membership in the right-wing tribe.” The main purpose of a gun is for decoration, according to Amanda. “Like a designer purse or expensive jewelry,” she writes, “the purpose of having a gun is to be seen and to send a message about your taste, your cultural affiliations, and, of course, your ability to afford expensive items like that.”
I know. I’m sorry. I have to quote these passages for the readers to understand how truly bat-guano she is. The things that go on in Amanda’s anti-gun fever-addled mind is quite astonishing.
And being seen with the gun is how Amanda brings Christmas into the topic. Amanda sees social media photos like one of a cute blonde proudly holding up the .415/.45LC Judge she got for Christmas and one of Gramps looking through the sight of his new rifle beside the illuminated Christmas tree, and Amanda views them like she’s looking at snakes at the zoo’s reptile exhibit. She’s equally fascinated and repulsed by the images. She linked to Buzzfeed and the Atlantic, which both dedicated posts to people displaying the guns they received for Christmas, so Amanda isn’t the only one who is perplexed by the phenomenon of ordinary, law-abiding Americans showing off the new bang-bangs Santa brought them.
I think Amanda’s point was that people shouldn’t post pictures of the cool holiday presents they get. Or maybe she’s saying people shouldn’t post photos of themselves on social media in front of the tree with a gun because it could traumatize the children and shock poor old fragile Aunt Margie into heart failure at the sight of her beloved relative brandishing a firearm. Or, worst case scenario, the image could turn other friends and relatives into homicidal maniacs.
Amanda repeated the phrase “social signaling” eight times throughout her column. It’s a damn silly wannabe-psychobabble term she uses to describe the reason why people show off their guns. Okay, go with that. How about taking it as a clue not to screw with them?
She wrote that “this isn’t about ‘safety’ or ‘rights.’ It’s about self-definition.” To make her point, she added some images in which some yutz took existing pics of Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz holding guns, and he photoshopped dildos into the photos in place of the guns. She saw the four Republicans holding the “dildos” as if they were “precious item[s] of beauty to behold.” The juxtaposition seemed so weird to her because dildos, unlike guns, are practical items, yet no one holds their dildos like those men hold their guns–against their torsos, up in the air, or against a display board during a Senate committee hearing.
Amanda found subtlety and nuance (her words) in the artiste’s reworks. Replacing guns with phallic vibrating sexual devices! Hill-AIR-ee-ous! What a brilliant photoshopper! Why had no one else ever thought of doing that? So nuanced, so subtle!
Errright. If the images were any more subtle and nuanced, I might have missed how unintelligent Amanda and this favorite new artist of hers were. This is supposed to pass as a funny-yet-serious political message, but both Amanda and the ‘shopper come off like immature 14-year-olds.
Amanda wrote that no one, not even the “entirely sex positive” kind, runs around waving dildos over their heads. (I wouldn’t consider myself a negative sex enthusiast in the slightest. Just thought I’d put that out there.) Nobody has pictures of themselves taken with their dildos or show their dildo collections to house guests. Dildos were made to be used and put away, she said. Like a pencil, I assume. Or a tube of toothpaste. Or a hammer. Or a butter knife. Or a…
Phallic symbols, phallic symbols all around us!
However, I don’t think artificial penii are thought of as strictly practical. They’re called sex toys by most women (or men–I won’t judge). Though there are undoubtedly some who do more than simply use their dildos and put them away, it is true that most who have them don’t make a point of advertising that they own them. They have fun–private fun–with them, unless sexual urges are considered nothing more than an irritating burden like it seems to be for many modern-day feminazis. Then dildos are simply practical…utilitarian.
But no one’s trying to outlaw vibrators. Nobody would crazy enough to come between a woman and her pretend dingus, especially when Amanda, the miserable misandrist, would be among the first to revolt.
And yes, I’m aware of wording. Quite muchly.
As for the gun, Amanda thinks that the gun industry drives the sale of firearms. No…no. No, it doesn’t. Poor child. It’s people like Obama, like angry Amanda, like the murdering terrorists of San Bernardino–ohh, yes, I lumped them together, I’m a very terrible terrible person with the rhetorics and the inflammatories, shame shame–it’s people like them who are the gun industry’s biggest promoters. The more they talk…the more they want to disarm the tens of millions who have never and will never shoot nor kill a person with their impractical and useless social-signaling identity markers…the more these mass shooting incidents occur under their leadership… the more people that will go out to buy guns in order to ensure that they will be able to defend their lives and the lives of their families.
So keep it up, intemehllectuals, acamuhdemians, and polimahticians. The gun industry thanks you.
I think I’ve written enough about Amanda for a while.
(Post updated with the map of U.S. gun shootings.)
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Paulie Walnuts mentions fire extinguishers in the comments. A very wise and appropriate comparison, in my opinion. How many of those those useless, impractical decorative objects never get used at home? So what’s the point in having them?
