First Draft

This shit again: 

KNOXVILLE, Iowa — As Democrats have fled rural America — or rural America has fled Democrats — many of them, living in cities, are left without an understanding of rural culture and its core values. If it isn’t on abortion, our deepest cultural divide might be on guns. The guns issue also has a profound political dimension, reliably driving rural Americans into Republican arms.

You know, Democrats in cities understand gun culture just fine. Here, let me explain it to you:

There are hunters who like to hunt. There are hobby shooters who go to ranges. And then there are racist paranoiacs who drive around in vans covered in HITLERY stickers who can’t stop waving every single gun they own around, who eat Fox News and InfoWars for breakfast lunch and dinner, who can just never SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THEIR STUPID GUNS.

Those are three distinct groups, and when I, a city Democrat, was growing up, the first two laughed their asses off at the third and there was no major lobbying group to tell them to make common cause against the evil conspiracy of reasonable regulations on 5-year-olds owning M-16s or whatever it is milquetoast thing Democrats stand accused of these days.

If all people did with guns in “rural America” was hunt animals and protect their houses from horror-movie villains breaking in, that might not be every city Dem’s bag but it would be fine. You know why?

BECAUSE NOBODY WOULD HAVE TO HEAR ABOUT THE FUCKING GUNS THEN.

God almighty, I am right up to here with the guns right now, how much you love them and how sacred they are and your great-great-grandpappy who fought for slavery in the Confederacy and whatever else. I understand gun culture just fine and it bores the living shit out of me and the only reason I bother engaging with it at all is that lots of people are getting DEAD.

You know, for the past two years we’ve been hearing about how Republicans were so sick of having basic respect for others “shoved down their throats” that they had to vote in the current racist monster and his gang of ten-a-penny fascisti in the White House. They were so, so sick of political correctness that they had to burn the whole world down. Their dicks all fell off because women were writing words on the Internet and they had no choice but to yell LOCK HER UP and vote for Trump.

Political correctness and women voting having killed exactly nobody, I would then turn that deep understanding of others’ culture right back around and offer this.

You can have all the guns you want.

Provided you don’t shove them down everybody else’s throat all the time.

A.

Been doing a lot of talking lately about how beholden politicians are to the NRA, and why.

Money alone doesn’t explain it. We could crowdfund in an hour what it takes to buy Marco Rubio. Stupidity doesn’t explain it either;

And I don’t honestly even think malice explains it. I don’t think Marco wants kids to die, I mean actively wants to stab a first grader in the neck or anything.

I just don’t think he’s thinking about this all that hard.

I don’t think any Republicans are. I don’t think any Democrats are, for that matter, either. They’re just … this is what you do.

If you want to run as an R in a red district, if you want to rep a red state, if you want to get elected, here’s the process. For the past 50 years, here’s the process. You take the NRA’s donations and you take their reliable voters and you take their field operations, and you offer your thoughts and prayers, and you count on nothing changing because then you don’t have to change.

Truth be told, it’s more laziness than anything else. How many people are handcuffed to “this is the way things work?” I mean how many times in your real life do you contemplate the effort it would take to tear down a workaround and start doing something new? Very few people greet that prospect with anything other than exhaustion.

You’re Marco Rubio, and you’re a Republican, so you take the money and what comes with it. You don’t think you’re gonna be asked by a kid in a town hall why you’re such a soulless whore, nobody does that to you, so you have no answer prepared.

In a way it’s worse than if Rubio and his ilk really were passionate defenders of the unlimited right to firearms. At least then they’d be putting some kind of principle over the lives of their constituents.

As it stands, they’re looking at the spreadsheet, deciding the numbers work out in their favor, and asking if they can skip the rest of this meeting since they already know how it goes. For years, they’ve known.

Now they don’t. Not anymore.

A.

Pretty much:

We’re not trying to convert NRA supporters. We’re trying to beat them. https://t.co/6BaIetknbK

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) February 24, 2018

If the past decade and a half has taught us anything it’s the futility of trying to find common ground with disingenuous peddlers of right-wing conspiracies who make money on not being convinced of anyone’s viewpoint but their employers’. Why on earth would we want to convert them? What would we get out of it?

Oh, I supposed we’d get the fickle loyalty of a group of voters whose hold on reality is so tenuous that they continually believe some Democrat is coming to take their guns even though THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED AND NEVER WILL. I suppose we’d bask in the temporary approval of people who think every Republican president is gonna singlehandedly outlaw abortion even though NONE OF THEM EVER HAVE NOR EVEN CAN REALLY AT ALL. That and a sack is worth a sack.

I don’t want a bunch of people around me who have to be converted to the idea that you shouldn’t be able to own a goddamn machine gun if you’re a wife-beating paranoiac who has a history of terrible behavior. I don’t need to get all snuggly with folks for whom that is a controversial position. If “not giving a dude who fantasizes about shooting up 5th grade a Howtizer” is a thing you have to be talked into, please take your flatware out of the toaster, and no you can’t sit with us.

And honestly, the time spent struggling to perfectly word the Facebook post that would make your gun-nut cousin take his TRUMP THAT BITCH sticker off his truck would be better spent registering your neighbor to vote and giving her and her mom a ride to the polls.

A.

This is a glorious evisceration of Chicago’s worst newspaper columnist, who’s typical of so many old middle-class scolds in that Kass thinks it’s just fine if people in “those neighborhoods” die so long as it doesn’t happen near him:

“Chicago police commanders aren’t supposed to be shot to death, not there, not at the heart of city business and politics.”

As with so many John Kass columns in this stage of his career, I can only wonder: Where to start?

1. Ignore the stats. Go by feel – perhaps the feel you get from Fox News.

2. People’s sense of safety is shaken by what happened Tuesday because it was downtown. What people? Downtown people, the only people who are actually people, in Kass’s construction, because a lot of other people have had their sense of safety shaken – if it ever existed – long ago.

Perhaps what Kass means is that his sense of safety has been shaken, because the killing of a cop happened so close to the office he has commuted to for decades from the suburbs.

3. Police commanders aren’t supposed to be shot to death. Who is? Thugs. They’re supposed to be shot to death.

It’s so predictable. Since, well, forever, the media expresses shock over terrible events that happen in places where they aren’t supposed to. The accretion of those events doesn’t seem to teach us that they actually happen everywhere, to all kinds of people.Certainly not with the same regularity, but then, that’s an equation the media ought to continue to examine with renewed vigor and compassion.

Go read the whole thing. The only possible response to “this shouldn’t happen here” is to ask, “Then where should it happen?” And somehow these sheltered pricks never do have an answer to that one.

A.