Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Good Guys with Guns are Not...

In yet another reckless and meaningless shooting spree, this time in Colorado Springs, CO a heavily armed man shot three people before being killed by the police. Halfway across the country in Chicago, a customer at a Mexican market who was carrying a licensed concealed weapon shot a man who was trying to rob the market. Both of these shootings took place on Saturday, the day before Halloween, Colorado Springs in the morning and Gage Park, Chicago that night. While firearm murders are routine and occur so regularly that the latest ones barely last more than a day as news, the contrast between these two incidents is rather striking and cries out for some examination.

Guns; as tools of death, as valuable merchandise, and as a worldview are the perfect alignment of fear and power among oligarchs and the mob. Rarely do popular and elite opinion combine around an issue the way they do with firearms. Regular people spontaneously jump to the defense of gun manufacturers in every instance of gun violence when they assert that buying as many as they want is their right. Despite billions spent propagandizing the masses on other right wing bugaboos, regular people rarely jump to the defense of other giant corporations with the same kind of enthusiasm.

Recently the enthusiasm has jumped from merely owning guns and being able to buy as many as they can without any restrictions, to actually using them. Whether the uptick in demands to open carry, concealed carry, and "stand your
ground" began with the scumbag George Zimmerman or the election of Barack Obama, there has been a definite shift from demanding the right to hunt deer to the right to hunt humans.

There is a clear implication in comments about the foiled robbery in Gage Park, Fox and Friends wrote that this was "Proof good can come from guns." Because... well, this is what the robber looked like. His name was Reginald Gildersleeve and he was not a bright kid who was going to college in the fall as many other shooting victims lately are described. No, he was kind of a bad guy with a long record of criminality. So good riddance says just about everyone commenting with one hand while the other seductively strokes their gun or concealed-carry permit.

There was a joke in the 1970's that a conservative was a liberal who'd been mugged. So many of the commenters I saw were pontificating on how awesome it would have been to pull the trigger on Mr. Gildersleeve. The Chicago Tribune reported that the police were unlikely to file charges against the shooter. The comment sections exploded with self righteous indignation. "Charges? That guy deserves a medal!" Was the oft-repeated refrain. The gun enthusiasts like to state that Chicago has the most strict gun laws in the country and that they don't do any good because 'Obama's home town is horrifically violent'. While that is a lie on many levels, what kind of a double standard is that? Gun nuts screech about how violent Chicago is, but cheer when a black guy is murdered while trying to rob a store? 

Anyway, it turns out that Gildersleeve didn't actually have a real gun. It was a paintball gun.

However, in Colorado Springs the killer was wandering around the neighborhood carrying an AR-15 but no good guy with his own gun was there to stop him. And the police were actually powerless to do anything before Noah Harpham took aim and opened fire because wandering around carrying an AR-15 is perfectly legal in Colorado Springs and many other places in our 21st Century Wild West. 

Of course, these insane perversions of law means that Harpham was a "good guy" right up until the millisecond before shooting random passersby. As opposed to Gildersleeve, who was a bad guy from the moment he got out of bed that morning, even though he wasn't actually carrying a weapon. But his killer was a licensed and perfectly legal vigilante even after repeatedly shooting an unarmed man because, gosh darn it you just can't trust those people in the city. 

So everyone make sure you study this handy guide for the next time an upstanding citizen is walking around the neighborhood in your area carrying a semi-automatic rifle.