See this putz in the picture? He was standing outside the Michigan State Capitol building protesting something or other last year. Why did he have two assault rifles strapped to his chest plus what appears to be a small Ruger LC9 pistol in his right hand? Because in Michigan the law allows him to walk around showing off his guns.
This idiot probably paid at least $1,500 for those three guns. So, he was going to make goddamn sure that he could get his picture taken with all his most sacred possessions and then no doubt stuck the pic on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or some other social media site which he uses to ‘communicate’ with all his friends.
By the way, I love how the advertisers who inundate my handheld and my laptop celebrate how the internet gives me all kinds of new ways to connect with my family and my friends. In the olden days, I communicated just as easily by dialing a phone number on my landline phone, and during the entire conversation I didn’t see one fucki*g advertisement for organic dog food or a new underarms shaver, or a remedy to reduce the size of my prostate, or anything else.
If I wanted to send a picture around with the favorite thing belonging to me, I had a choice of two: The first and most favorite item was my Marty Marion baseball glove, which I still have, by the way, even though I haven’t played a game of baseball in more than fifty years. My second favorite possession was a Roy Rogers plastic revolver along with a black, leather holster and a Roy Rogers ‘official’ cowboy hat.
When I stood in front of my grandfather’s fruit store in Rockaway Beach, Queens and twirled that gun on my index finger, I wasn’t standing on Edgemere Avenue in New York City. I was standing in a Western saloon about to shoot the bad guy, played by Jack Palance, while I played the good guy, Alan Ladd, in the movie Shane.
You probably never saw the movie, Shane. I always wore my Roy Rogers gun and hat when I walked three blocks to the RKO-Keith’s movie theater where I sat through that movie at least ten times.
The point is that I was a kid and the whole gun thing was make-believe. If I have one problem with Jamie Raskin’s op-ed in which he criticizes idiots like the gun-toting idiot above for pretending that the 2nd Amendment gives him the ‘right’ to overthrow the government the way several thousand morons tried to overthrow our government on January 6th, it’s the idea that there’s the slightest chance that anyone could represent an insurrectionist ‘threat’ to the United States by going out and plunking down a thousand bucks or more to buy an adult toy like an AR-15.
To quote the so-called ‘demented’ President we now have sitting behind the Resolute desk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., if you want to overthrow the United States government, you’d better show up with your F-15. Actually, what you probably need these days is an F-22 Raptor or an F-35.
Either way, you’ll have to lay out just a few more bucks than what you’ll lay out to buy an assault rifle, unless you live in the Communist state of Massachusetts where I live and where you can’t buy an AR-15, although thanks God I don’t have to turn in the AR-15 that I currently own – at least not yet.
Whew. Thanks God. I can still protect myself, my wife, and my cats from the tyranny of Governor Charlie Baker.
Hey – just wait one fucki*g minute! Baker’s a Republican. He’s not one of those tyrannical Democrats trying to impose the Deep State, right?
But Baker signed the law in Massachusetts that bans the sale of AR-15s. Now I’m totally and completely confused.
But I’m not the only one who’s confused. So is the guy standing there with his assault rifles and so, for that matter, is Congressman Raskin who wants us to believe that the grown-up children parading around with the props used in the John Wick movies constitute the necessary arsenal needed to challenge the political hegemony of the United States.
Could someone walk into a public space with an AR-15 and start blasting away? Sure. It happens every day.
Dear Congressman Raskin, let’s not confuse the quotidian shootings that kill and injure more than 275 Americans with the bunch of yahoos who invaded the Capitol on January 6th and left their guns home, by the way.