The Uses of Violence

I don't own a gun. Never have. Never even fired one, although I've got plenty of close family members and dear friends who do it all the time. As long as they don't do it while aiming at me or someone I love, what the fuck do I care?

But I wouldn't call myself non-violent. If someone physically attacks me, I'm going to do my best to rip his fucking head off. I might not succeed, but it won't be for lack of trying. And if the only way to save my own life or the life of a loved one is to pick up a gun and fire it at an attacker, you bet your ass I'm going to do it.

But what the wingnut freakazoids are threatening to use violence over is the self-defense equivalent of a mildly insulting remark. The Rude Pundit explains:

Did you get that? If you don't trust the government, go out and buy a gun. Because why? Because you can use the muzzle to push the buttons in a voting booth? Or because you can use it to shoot and kill any government motherfuckers who are going to...well, do what?

See, all the savage (and Savage) talk on the right that has inspired wackanoids to go out and shoot up unitarian churches and Holocaust Museum guards is for punk ass reasons. Glenn Beck, who may truly be straitjacket-and-rhino-tranq-his-ass crazy, and his ilk on markets large and small are whipping their frightened, underinsured, teetering on the brink listeners and viewers to a peaking froth because of their idiots' understanding of policy and history. They've reduced the American Revolution to being about taxes. Well, sure, and when a foreign government at the point of a gun and bayonet forces them to pay their tribute to the king, join their military, and quarter their soldiers, then we can talk.

SNIP

So what is driving the good right wing to talk more and more openly about arming themselves for some coming uprising? Has Barack Obama sent the FBI to break down law-abiding conservatives' doors, take their guns, shoot their women, and rape their dogs? Did Joe Biden start an enemies list and had a handcuffed Sean Hannity dragged to a prison where he can be beaten until he gives the whereabouts of Steve Doocy? Holy shit, an ignorant outside observer might think, what is so deadly that a media figure like Beck is, in essence, telling people to buy guns now?

And the answer is a slight raise in the marginal tax rate on the wealthy? An attempt to provide health care to uninsured Americans? A legally-elected government in a representative democracy spending money in the way those campaigning said it would be spent? If Ben Franklin were around, he'd scoff, "Pussies," beat Glenn Beck unconscious with his cane, let Thomas Paine sodomize him, and head back to Paris for more time with whores.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....