By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
There is a deadly virus on the loose in this country. An unstoppable plague rampaging through communities big and small like an untrammeled beast, picking us off day by day, two, three, four at a time. The news gorges itself on the gorey statistics every night, teasing us with expanding body counts and daring us not to touch that dial and miss another gruesome tidbit. This disease is their plaything. They pretend to cover it because they care but they can barely contain their glee every time it claims another victim, because another victim almost always means another ratings hike, desperately needed for Fourth Estate subsistence in the post-Trump era, and they’re not disappointed. The bodies just keep on dropping everyday as this virus grows closer and closer to us all.
I’m not talking about COVID. I’m talking about America’s other epidemic, gun violence. Or at least liberals like to frame this problem as an epidemic and for once I agree with them and not just to fulfill my sick zeal for clever allegories either. While America has experienced a precipitous drop in most forms of violent crime over the last two decades, we retain a uniquely high body count compared to our other first world neighbors and seem to be a deadly playing field for genres of mass slaughter that seem peculiarly American in character. I’ve never made my disdain for gun control of any kind a mystery. I come from the Alex Cockburn school of artillery friendly leftism. But even I have to admit their is something going on here.
2021 has only just begun but it’s already been a banner year for America’s other national pass time, the mass shooting. In just four months we’ve seen over 150 of those goddamn things, 50 in the weeks following the Atlanta Spa Shootings alone. This is enough to freak even the staunchest gun nut out a bit and naturally the Democrats are pouncing on this excuse to roll out more kneejerk gun control regulations. “What’s the problem with that?’, my left wing friends might ask. Well, aside from being patently immoral to deny working class class people the right to defend themselves, it completely ignores that other very American genre of gun violence known as the police shooting.
Any logical form of gun control depends on an armed class to maintain it. Americans will never just throw away their Glocks like a bunch of drunken Australians, so that leaves the job of regulating American firearm rights up to the state, which means the police. That’s right, hippie, the same thugs you’ve been protesting all year and righteously calling to defund will be the paladins in charge of defiling the constitutional rights of more minorities like me. These are the same psychos who lynched George Floyd. The same remorseless killing machine that took another 64 lives during the trial of Derek Chauvin alone. They killed 1,127 people last year. That is more than twice as many as those killed by civilian active shooters and I honestly see very little difference between the two.
