I know this isn’t exactly a Louisville story, but after the mall shooting in Indianapolis at the Greenwood Park Mall, I feel obligated to say something that might not be said in the midst of the chatter surrounding this incident. There were three people shot and killed by a gunman with a long gun and many rounds of ammunition. The gunman was stopped, killed by another person, the mythical “good guy with a gun.” The type of gun hasn’t been identified just yet, but no matter; here we are with another shooting. In just hours, we’ll be on to the next and will let this one fade like all the others into memory with inaction from our politicians and citizens.
The gun nuts and their weapons are instruments of the tyranny they claim to fear. Yes, I said it. It bears repeating: the gun nuts and their weapons are instruments of the tyranny they claim to fear.
I’ll address the “good guy with a gun” later.
The American attraction to guns borders on obsession and is a kink like no other in this country, fed by the neofascism of the modern Republican party. If Republicans feed the kink, they don’t fear it being used against them. They get to be the dom while their subs get to hold the weapons and point it where their masters tell them. Coincidentally, it is never pointed at their masters.
Modern Republicanism is the sort of oppressive, rights-stealing, fake morality pimping, herd-mentality leading that creates the perfect framework for their brand of fascism to slide in undetected as “tyrannical,” or as it is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, “the cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary use of power or control.”
The way that Republicans will say that “guns don’t kill people” and turn the argument to the person and the type of control necessary for “those kinds of people,” is simply a dogwhistle that their belief system is about the control of the body, and not the instrument of deadly force.
So, in the Greenwood Park Mall shooting, we have a shooter with a long gun and 100 rounds of ammo, and we have the “good guy with a gun” who shot and killed the shooter. On the surface we have “danger” and the “stoppage of danger” by another with a weapon. It looks like a very simple scenario until we realize both shooter and good guy are one in the same, instruments of the same side. Let me clarify that I am not villainizing the man who stopped the mass shooter. He thought he was doing his duty and he did likely save lives.
What I mean by this statement — that they are instruments of the same side — is that neither of their weapons were used or available to fight tyranny; they were both used against another citizen. One citizen, of course, putting many others in danger, sold on the idea that guns can solve problems. The “good guy” used his weapon as judge, jury and executioner for the state, sold on the same idea — that guns can solve problems.
Do you see where I’m going?
This is deeper than the surface of this situation. On a very basic level, we have two people who likely share some very simple core beliefs about guns and the rights to bear arms.
Both shooter and “good guy” get their information from the same source, the idea that their guns are within their rights and that they are for personal protection or to fight against the appearance of being oppressed.
This situation certainly seems to fit that plotline. Except that while these two gunmen were shooting it out in the mall, the people who made this event possible in the first place —gun-pimping modern Republicans —were actively passing laws to make both of their lives less truly free.
Modern Republicans call themselves the right or even the “hard right,” which is directly linked to ideology that we were taught is dangerous when we learned history as children.
This ideology brands itself as moral, for the people, et cetera, but in practice its functions are restrictive and inhumane. Voting restrictions, healthcare restrictions, nativism — except in the practice of material support for the citizens. This ideology increases militarization of the police and heavily funds the military, and while the citizens in America are also able to be armed (ahem, some citizens), the level of personal gun ownership and access will always be below the level to truly subvert the risk of totalitarianism. “Pew pew” vs. tanks, planes and bombs.
The truth is, on the backside of this shooting at Greenwood Park Mall, we’re left with bodies and no accountability. Why? Because for accountability to be achieved, we would need to restrict personal gun ownership which would start a landslide of citizens truly asking for the return of power to them from their government. Less tanks, planes and bombs… because if we can’t have them, neither can you.
And, what we know is that the government isn’t relinquishing any control. So blood on American streets will continue to be spilled and nothing will happen with guns because as long as we are fighting and killing each other under the guise of personal protection, freedom and “tyranny,” those in power are safe to truly do whatever they wish to restrict our freedom, movement, ability to reproduce or not…
We’re doing their job for them. We’re the tyranny for the tyrant.
Capiche? •
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