So I’ve been meaning to blog more. I read an entire pro-creationism book, meaning to blog it chapter by chapter. I’ve been following the debates on guns, deficit spending, and gay marriage (pardon the usage) religiously. I have my comments, my thoughts, my insights. And every time I muster up the enthusiasm to actually make a full-fledged entry about a subject, the weight of the avalanche of idiocy tumbles upon me. The last post I did on guns truly emphasizes this. [See post here] So yeah, I’m well aware of the barrage of asshatitude that awaits me with every post. And for years (I’ve been doing this, on Xanga or WordPress, under one name or another, since 2004) this hasn’t bothered me. Yet suddenly… I’m weary.

I just don’t have the energy to deal with (and these are all real things people have told me, if not quoted verbatim, then as close as memory permits):
“You hate guns? You’re un-American”
“Obama’s a Nazi!”
“Don’t like God? Move to Russia!”
“If a man can marry a man, why can’t a man marry a turtle?”

Fuck. Looking at the above subset and how can you not be overly-enraged or just overly overwhelmed? This is what I get for trying to actually share my views with the world. And when I felt like maybe, JUST MAYBE I’d venture into the waters again, I commented on a right-wing friend’s FB post about how climate change is a myth. I commented, and got the general “climategate” response. So responded with a list of bipartisan, multicountry responses saying climategate itself is complete BS. Not only did she respond by giving me a link to a site from a year before my rebuttal, but her friends called me various forms of idiot. This alone was enough to remind me: I hate other people.

Between that and my sour history with some people here, I can’t find the motivation to actually give a rat’s ass about sharing my beliefs here, whether deeply-held or logically-found. No matter what, they will be shat upon by the narrow-minded, the hate-filled, the outright selfish or the straight-up assholes.

This isn’t a goodbye, this is just… a proclamation. Politics irks me and Xanga friendships tend to hurt me, so what do I care about this for?

In this recent chapter of the gun rights debate, I don’t think either side is willing to budge. In fact, when discussing this with some of my right-wing friends on Facebook (always a productive thing to do), even when I was willing to try and meet in the middle  I couldn’t get one millimeter of movement on their behalf towards the center.

First I bring up that guns should be registered on a national level. This includes closing the gun show loophole, which allows private citizens to sell guns to people with no registration or oversight whatsoever. Around 40% of all gun sales in America fall under this category according to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and at least 10% of gun violence in this country is committed with guns purchased legally with this loophole according to the U.S. Department of Justice. To put that in perspective, that equates to about 26,000 firearms used in crime. It seems perfectly reasonable to require at least as much registration and documentation with your guns (which are used for no use other than to destroy people, animals or things) as you do with your car (which, if you’re a sane human being, is only unintentionally used to destroy anything). Yet currently it’s legal to buy a gun with no record of the purchase, while the same is not true of a car.

Wait, do I have to register this or not? Is it a car with guns, or guns with a car?

“Well even if we have these laws,” counters the gun nut as he caresses his AK-47 with more love than I’ve shown any of my pets, “criminals will just break them. After all, that’s what makes them criminals! So what’s the point?” I should hope that anybody with a 5th grader’s understanding of logic can see the gaping hole in this argument: that just because somebody will break the law doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have the law. To be extremely hyperbolic about it, why outlaw murder if people are going to murder anyways? To give a much more reasonable example, everybody speeds, so why enforce a speed limit? If you’ve ever seen that asshole switching lanes without signalling while driving 110mph through traffic, that answer should be obvious to you. And even if your argument is “no new laws, but enforce the existing laws,” how many of those people are backing the idea that people with unregistered guns should get an actual prison sentence, not the slap on the wrist that the US (and most states) give us right now?

Fucking pigs don’t respect my RIGHT to drive 85 through a school zone. FASCISTS!

 So let’s assume I’ve brought up a lot of other points that basically every other leftie has brought up in this debate already, almost all of which are completely obvious to other civilized western nations (just look at Australia, which saw a mass shooting as a reason to reform their gun laws).

So far in this meager blog, we’ve run the (admittedly weak) gauntlet of reasonable solutions to the indisputable issue of gun violence in this country. So now that we’ve covered almost all the field with reason, where does the gun nut retreat? To the corner, which they defend with “SECOND AMENDMENT, MOTHERFUCKER!”

Now don’t get me wrong, for the time in which they were written, the Bill of Rights (aka the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which include the only parts of the Constitution that most people know) were incredibly insightful and prescient. That being said, our Founding Fathers™ were not infallible.  They were men as limited by their age as we are by ours. That being said, men (as angelic as American history texts may portray them to be) are limited in their scope, and these men of the 18th century could not possibly foresee what the weapons of the 21st century would be like. When these men drafted the 2nd amendment, the most powerful arm a man could bear was a musket, or a canon if the man was particularly wealthy and/or had very strong arms.

My point is, the Constitution is a document limited by the time in which it was written, which obviously makes it, at best, partially-applicable today. The Supreme Court even upheld that the militia part of the 2nd amendment wasn’t crucial in post-slavery America. which to me means, in law parlance, that the Constitution is a “living document” that changes to one extent or another with the time. So really, who gives a shit what Thomas Jefferson thought? He owned and fucked slaves. Is this really the man you want to base our country’s morality on?

This show is much more difficult to watch given the historical context of the name.

The fact is, the Founding Fathers™ were not prophets. They couldn’t possibly know what the country they were creating would be two and a half centuries later. The Bill of Rights is not the end all be all of law, which is why we’ve added over a dozen laws to it. So don’t whip out your cock and jerk it while shouting “SECOND AMENDMENT, MOTHERFUCKERS!” to defend your right to own assault rifle that can fire 100 rounds in a minute. Our Founding Fathers™ weren’t picturing a time when it was a CNN orgasm to have some dude walk into a school and shoot as many people as possible before he had to reload. Just because they gave you the right to bear arms doesn’t mean they had the foresight to see the insanely overpowered rifles that would be used to mow down 7-year-olds.

So let’s break this down. Let’s exclude the (idiotic) notion that “THE CONSTITUTION [generic argument that is functionally retarded and basically says if you limit my right to buy death machines from whoever whenever for whatever and if you disagree you hate Americuh]“. Let’s look at the real world, not the dream the Founding Fathers™ were so excited about that they, at some point, let drip through their hand (that’s a masturbation joke). Fuck the Founding Fathers™. Let’s look at this practically, assuming that the Founding Fathers™ aren’t influencing our lawmaking abilities, and let’s try to make laws base upon (gasp!) common sense.