Sunday, February 18, 2018

Guns, Spoons, and Exploding Brussels Sprouts


Please don't take the following as an attack on guns but instead on faulty logic and poorly conceived memes:



No, spoons don’t make people fat, pencils don’t cause people to misspell, and cars aren’t outlawed just because people drive drunk. But unlike a gun, a pencil has an eraser. If you misspell a word, you can change it. You can’t unshoot someone. Likewise, if you gain weight by eating too much, you can put down the spoon and lose weight by dieting. You can’t make things right by putting the gun down after using it and not using it for a while. Dead is a pretty chronic condition. Plus, I’ve never seen someone use a spoon to make someone else fat. As for cars, every possible improvement has been made to make driving safer. If they did the same with guns, the bullets would be made from NERF. And if you’re caught driving while drinking you lose your driving privileges. Shouldn’t anyone caught in possession of a gun while intoxicated lose their gun possession privileges by such logic? Lastly, cars, spoons, and pencils are pretty damn useful items. You can’t eat soup with a gun. You can’t write your grocery list with an AR-15 automatic rifle (I know it’s not an automatic rifle, but I said it because I know it gets people’s panties in a twist. It did, didn’t it?). In short, guns don’t have much use for the average person, cars do. If we woke up tomorrow in a world without cars, our system would come crashing down. I have to think if guns disappeared, we’d all be better off.

Again, I didn’t write this to pick on guns or gun owners, I just like to follow a metaphor to its logical conclusions. If you can’t handle a meme responsibly, I have little confidence in your ability to handle a bullet-dispensing death machine. Not everybody finds those nasty things as endearing as you do. Not everyone collects them the way granny does her Precious Moments figurines. But to each his own. Spend a little bit of time respecting the feelings and concerns of others, and perhaps others will be able to tolerate the filthy and dangerous compulsion you have and the price society pays for it. Oh, and respect my right to smoke whatever substance gives me pleasure, so long as I don’t blow it in your face or threaten your children with it. My right to the pursuit of happiness precedes the 2nd amendment. 

I know guns don’t seem threatening to other gun lovers, but they can be quite off-putting to those of us who dislike them. If you can’t appreciate how you appear threatening to others when carrying or talking fetishistically about guns, imagine how someone of a different ethnicity and religion speaking in a different language while holding a gun would make you feel. Because believe it or not, not everyone sees you as the protector of their way of life. Not everybody sees you as a good guy, no matter how pure of heart you might be. Because a lot of us judge you by your very need to carry a gun in the first place, fair or not. If you were carrying a cobra, it wouldn’t be any different. You might be a veterinarian who just saved the animal’s life, I still wouldn’t want to stand next to you and would feel better once you left. It’s just a natural reaction to danger, and guns are dangerous. Guns are dangerous, which is main reason a lot of people don’t own them. They don’t like to be near them, and in all honesty they don’t understand other people who have a passion for them. If you can’t understand that, just imagine Brussels Sprouts that explode.

Now I’m not certain what will help stop gun violence, but I propose a new law. Before you can purchase a gun, you must be able to prove you have a sense of humor. Because if you can’t appreciate the spirit in which this was written, you probably shouldn’t have a gun in the first place, right? Right?

Seriously, some of my best friends are gun owners. And how about that Charlton Heston, isn’t he a credit to his race?


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