Ever feel like you're caught in a GOP/NRA/Mass Shooting Groundhog Day swirly-swirl existence?
You know, that familiar feeling you get after (and between) every mass shooting where the GOP/NRA emphatically objects to any sort of gun control legislation?
How familiar is this?
This is from 4 years ago and I was quoting something written 4 years before that.
Remember that political prop they once called "Joe The Plumber"?
He wrote an "Open Letter To The Parents of Victims Murdered By Elliot Rodger" and it was published at a website called "Barb Wire". It's now defunct but luckily you can find Joe's letter at The Way Back Machine.
Here's the setting: Elliot Rodger killed a whole mess of people (and then himself) in Isla
Vista California in 2014 and there were calls for gun control legislation to be passed.
That was about 8 years ago.
Anyway, Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher wrote this letter and here he is compassionately Joe-splaining the GOP/NRA response:
I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. But:
As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.
And as I wrote 4 years ago about Joe's epistle 4 years before that:
So there it is: hidden behind all of the ersatz sincerity of the many "thoughts and prayers" tweets we've read recently from the GOP, is this one thought - your dead kids don't trump my Constitutional rights.
And then I reframed:
In order to make sure that everyone has easy access to firearms, every now and then (and no one knows where or when), in order to protect our safety and liberty, a few schools/theatres/offices will have to be shot up by someone with easy access to lots and lots of guns and ammo. A few people here and there will have to die a bloody and gruesome death in order to guarantee America's Second Amendment rights.I wrote that February 16, 2018. It was true May 14, 2014, when Joe's letter was published at Barb Wire and how sad is it that it'll probably be true for some time.
By making it easy to access high powered firearms, they made it easy for Salvador Rolando to shoot up Robb Elementary School in Texas.
They have blood on their hands. It's there forever. It'll never wash off.
