Sunday, December 6, 2015

Sole Survivor of a Flurry of Mass Shootings Opposes Firearms Regulation

Even as the rate of all other gun-related crimes had been decreasing in the United States for decades, the rate of mass shootings had steadily increased as gun show loopholes were found to circumvent bans on assault rifles, mental health centers were defunded by the government, and the NRA captured both political parties. Experts on television declared that the solution to massacres in movie theaters was to add more guns to theaters; to slaughters in malls, it was to add more guns to malls; and to school shootings, it was to add more guns to schools. Soon enough, the United States was overflowing with guns.

And Americans were angry, very angry, because their political system was corrupt and unresponsive to the plight of the middle class and the poor. Both parties had catered to the wealthy business elites in exchange for their campaign contributions and for cushy jobs in the private sector. The combination of mass resentment and rage together with millions upon millions of state-of-the-art firearms boded ill for the nation’s survival.

In 2017, Texas alone sustained 362 mass shootings. The survivors fled the state, leaving it barren, but there was no escape. New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and all the other southern states erupted in gunfire as the mentally deranged, the marginalized, and the dispossessed as well as the jihadist terrorists vented their frustrations by spraying bullets in crowded places. Militarized police forces were deployed and demonized by fear-mongering right-wingers who awaited the prophesied End of Days. Militias went to war against the police, eventually leaving the southern states desolate and bereft of human inhabitants.

Liberal lawmakers took the loss of the southern half of their country as an opportunity to push for mild gun control laws, but they were ousted from office by NRA-backed candidates who merely had to call the liberals “communists” to win popular support even as the voters were cut down by hooligans’ gunfire soon after they left the U.S. Capitol.

Again, the survivors fled to the north, but the northerners found they had to arm themselves or be shot to pieces by the traumatized southerners. Through 2019 the mass shootings continued and looked increasingly like a civil war.

By 2020, the U.S. population dropped to around 100,000 proud, patriotic Americans.

Before the government fell, Congress again debated whether to regulate the shrunken gun industry that was still pumping out firearms and selling them to the beleaguered remnants of American civilization. Congress decided against halting the nation’s impending collapse, insisting that the Founders had been rabid anarchists who intended for the country to resemble not fattened, spoiled Middle America but something like the Wild West which had truly been the land of the free and the home of the brave.

As one Republican representative said, “The Founding Fathers upheld everyone’s right to bear arms for the purpose of stocking a militia. A militia has to be powerful enough to take down the government if the government should fail to uphold the law. Therefore, every American citizen has the right to carry even weapons of mass destruction to keep the government in check.”

Cosmopolitan Americans abroad rushed home to attempt to salvage their nation, but were picked off by gunfire soon after they stepped off the tarmac.

Canada and Mexico, too, moved into American territory and were promptly blasted en masse by Americans boasting the latest in military hardware. Thereafter, foreigners kept their distance.

When survivors in Montana realized that the government had neglected in their last firearms bill to allow for the sale of newly-designed magazines capable of carrying 400 rounds of ammunition, they nuked Washington D.C., rendering the country lawless.

In 2021, after a series of further mass shootings, there were only twelve Americans left alive. Six of the survivors engaged in a Mexican standoff over a dispute about who spilled beer on the shoe of whom. All six pulled their triggers and died in a hail of bullets.

The remaining five Americans deemed it wise to spread themselves out across the land to keep alive the American Dream. One, however, Howard Derringer, was mentally ill and hunted down the others, executing them with an assortment of submachine guns until only two Americans remained: Derringer and a former bus driver named Mark McEwan.

Before Derringer could locate and shoot McEwan, Derringer succumbed to an unknown ailment in 2023.

Mark McEwan was the sole survivor of American freedom. A peaceable man, McEwan allowed foreigners to observe his actions without launching a crazed assault on them.

He spent the bulk of his time agonizing over whether to impose restrictions on the use of firearms. One day, standing before a mirror, he gave a speech to himself.

“I speak to you today as president of this great nation,” he said, “having just voted for myself last week. I speak to you also as someone who is terribly thirsty. There’s no water for miles. Aside from that, I feel it’s incumbent on me to take up the issue of arms control. There’s no NRA anymore, so passing a ban on assault rifles would be feasible. I could throw all the long guns I see into a river. 

But as the last American, I also feel I have a duty to honour the American spirit. For that reason, I’ve decided not to control the use of firearms. Instead, I’ll shoot this sonuvabitch, blowing my brains out with a Colt M4 carbine. Let the blessed guns inherit the earth.”

With the loss of Mark McEwan and of the United States, China became the world’s largest gun manufacturer. In 2025, China annexed what had hitherto been the American heartland, honouring those previous generations of brave American souls who had eked out a living under the constant threat of being shot like a Third World dog in the streets, by turning that territory into a giant gun manufacturing facility.

21 comments:

  1. Texas has mass shootings? I think you're fully aware that the mass shootings have occurred in far left, anti-gun areas. How does it feel to be a morally superior Canadian? Does it become tiresome? You don't live in the US, so be thankful that you aren't subjected to the awful "tyranny" of gun owners. Perhaps Canada can allow the anti-gun Americans to move there so they'll be "safe." Then all of us pro-gun types will just kill each other off right, it's a win win!

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    1. Don't worry, I have just as much contempt for Canadian anti-culture as I do for the American monoculture. Read my article, "Why is Canada so Boring?" to confirm this.

      See the article below for state-by-state gun ownership. The southern state households generally have more guns than the northern ones, with the exceptions of Wyoming and Montana, which are still red states. Texas is my stereotype of a gun-loving state, which is why I chose it to get the ball rolling in this piece of satirical *fiction.* The mass shootings I'm writing about here start to happen in the future, in 2017.

      It looks like my little satire has offended you. Sorry about that, but that's actually a sign that the piece works as satire. The point is that because of the infamous paralysis of the US government, it's dreadfully plausible that the government wouldn't enact rational gun legislation even if its life depended on it. I stand by the force of that admittedly hyperbolic proposition.

      http://qz.com/437015/mapped-the-us-states-with-the-most-gun-owners-and-most-gun-deaths/

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    2. I think you write posts like this to vent your own personal frustration. It's not so much offensive as it is reactionary, emotional and whiny. Since you like gun death statistics, and believe most people love life enough to continue living it, let's take a look at how many of these guns deaths are suicides. Per fact check.

      "Firearm deaths, however, include suicides, and there are a lot of them. In 2013, there were a total of 33,636 firearm deaths, and 21,175, or 63 percent, were suicides"

      http://www.factcheck.org/2015/10/gun-laws-deaths-and-crimes/



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    3. Anon is coming from a culture that not just thinks 'emotional' is a derogatory term, but that everyone thinks in this way enough that he needn't defend his own culture. Never mind how the charge of 'whiny' is cliche as being an ad homenim to cover over lack of any evidence based argument. 'reactionary' falls into that pile along with it.

      How else would you act if you were offended? You'd call the other person reactionary, emotional and whiny - assuming you couldn't actually resort to physical violence immediately.

      What's frightening is how we know you better than you know yourself.

      But it's interesting that guns deaths have suicides included, if it's the case.

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    4. "Anon is coming from a culture that not just thinks 'emotional' is a derogatory term." Better than a culture where the "men" have been throughly emasculated.

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    5. Anon, I am indeed emotionally motivated to write my satires. Typically, some bit of absurdity strikes me as particularly outrageous and I find a more or less creative way to channel the anger or the disgust. I suspect the same sort of motivation is behind every piece of satire.

      But if in calling this article "reactionary," you mean it's counterfactual, meaning that it gets the basic facts wrong, I beg to differ. I already pointed out that I didn't misstate the Texas situation, since I'm talking about the future. And as I say in the satire's fist sentence, I'm not talking about gun crimes in general. Indeed, I acknowledge that contrary to popular opinion, that number has gone down. I'm talking specifically about mass shootings, the number of which has gone up and which is a distinctly American phenomenon. So while your statistic on suicide is interesting, it's irrelevant.

      I have, though, changed North Dakota to Montana as the country that nukes DC, since Montana seems to have more guns.

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    6. "I'm talking specifically about mass shootings, the number of which has gone up and which is a distinctly American phenomenon." Your reasoning behind the motivation for the shootings is what's inaccurate. Other than your mentioning of lack of help for the mentally ill, which I agree with BTW. The majority of mass shootings have been carried out, not by poor people, but by people quite comfortable materially. It does seem interesting that both sides of the gun debate, seem to overlook mental illness as the true culprit. If they do acknowledge it, it's always secondary. The finger is always pointed toward some ideology, grudge, etc. You seem to suggest that the US is full of socio-economic malcontents, who are armed to the teeth and ready to explode. This is not the case at all, the majority of guns are owned by middle/upper middle class people. The insane gun violence in places like Chicago should be obvious even to an outsider, it's inner city gangs/drug dealers. Since you use Texas as an example, take a look at Plano TX, a town I grew up near. It's absolutely overflowing with guns, and little to no gun crime. The argument that more guns always equals more gun crime has been dis-proven over and over, places like Plano are quite inconvenient for anti-gun types.

      http://freedomoutpost.com/2015/01/usa-first-world-gun-ownership-not-even-top-100-countries-murder-rate/


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    7. Again, I'm not talking about gun crime in general. Gun crime has gone down in the US. And you keep trying to draw connections between the satire's future history and the present conditions in the US. That would be appropriate if I were intending to make a scientific prediction about what's going to happen and why. But I'm not. It's a caricature that exaggerates to make a point.

      Still, the satire has to have some foot in reality to be interesting. So I do think the mass shootings are caused by a combination of mental health and marginalization/alienation, which is why I include those in the satire as the underlying causes. Even if recent mass shootings in the US haven't been caused by the sort of discontent we're currently seeing as the basis for Sanders' or Trump's support, I'm speculating that that could happen in the near future.

      And regardless of whether most guns are owned by the middle class, the fact is that overall the US has far more guns per capita than other comparable countries. It's much easier to buy a gun in certain states than it is anywhere in Europe or Canada. So if poor people wanted one, they could readily obtain one. The country is overflowing with guns.

      Check out Wiki's page on gun ownership per capita in each country. Canada has 30.8 guns per hundred people, the US has 112.6. The next most gun-happy country is Serbia with 69.7. Canada has federal firearms regulation, the US has none, so you can just move to the loophole states. According to the article cited in the Wiki page, the US now has more guns than people.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country

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    8. "So if poor people wanted one, they could readily obtain one. The country is overflowing with guns." The US government will never be taken down by a bunch of poor losers, with impotent fantasies of government overthrow.

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    9. Of course not. But that's because the second amendment's libertarian logic isn't followed through to its absurd conclusion, as it is in my satire, according to which the founders must have been anarchists because they would have permitted individuals to carry whatever firearms are powerful enough to make for a successful violent overthrow of a tyrannical government in their midst. Hence, individuals should be allowed to carry WMDs, that being necessary to "the security of a free state." Of course, there were no WMDs when the amendment was written. But now there are and the amendment stands. Hence the absurdity.

      One of the definitions of "militia" is: "a body of citizens organized in a paramilitary group and typically regarding themselves as defenders of individual rights against the presumed interference of the federal government." That's the relevant sense to today's rabid gun advocates. They take their libertarianism into anarchist territory. As I say in the satire, they await the End of Days and even encourage its arrival.

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    10. Here's some more on this from the wiki page on the second amendment, showing that the founders had that anti-tyranny thought in mind:

      'A foundation of American political thought during the Revolutionary period was concern about political corruption and governmental tyranny. Even the federalists, fending off their opponents who accused them of creating an oppressive regime, were careful to acknowledge the risks of tyranny. Against that backdrop, the framers saw the personal right to bear arms as a potential check against tyranny. Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts expressed this sentiment by declaring that it is "a chimerical idea to suppose that a country like this could ever be enslaved ... Is it possible ... that an army could be raised for the purpose of enslaving themselves or their brethren? or, if raised whether they could subdue a nation of freemen, who know how to prize liberty and who have arms in their hands?" Noah Webster similarly argued:

      'Before a standing army can rule the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States.

      'George Mason argued the importance of the militia and right to bear arms by reminding his compatriots of England's efforts "to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them ... by totally disusing and neglecting the militia." He also clarified that under prevailing practice the militia included all people, rich and poor. "Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers." Because all were members of the militia, all enjoyed the right to individually bear arms to serve therein.'

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Ratification_debates

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    11. "Hence, individuals should be allowed to carry WMDs" The materials for WMD's can be collected legally. This is what led to the Oklahoma City bombing.

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    12. Anon, do you ever get tired of your repeated behavior of name calling (in favor of anything else)? Like "Wow, am I a broken record on the name calling - I might try something different next time!?"

      The worst part is your fear. The things you'll do to make sure no one fails to call you a 'man'...and you'd have everyone else acting the same way, so you're not alone.

      I mean, you've just shown that you think if someone says 'you're emasculated and not a man', then that should mean shit to them? Do you think 'real' men need to hear others affirm their identity? Well yes you do, as much as you think anyone needs you to affirm their identity - showing you need someone to affirm your identity as a man as well.

      Which isn't an issue, really. It's just the lack of courage in facing that need. Your threatening to not call others men just nakedly shows how afraid you are of not being called a man. Tough it out a little, would ya?

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  2. Two quotes from you, a day apart.

    "Another complication is the fact that we adjust to our circumstances, as studies of worldwide happiness have shown, so that regardless of whether we're homeless or wealthy, we feel about the same level of happiness. We reach an equilibrium with our circumstances: sometimes we're overjoyed and sometimes we're sad, but we become accustomed to the norm."

    Quote from this post: "Americans were angry, very angry, because their political system was corrupt and unresponsive to the plight of the middle class and the poor."

    A bit of a contradiction don't you think?

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    1. Well, I don't see any contradiction here at all. First of all, this little article is a piece of satirical fiction. But leaving that aside, the point about happiness isn't that we're happy all the time, making anger impossible. The point is that we have a mechanism for adjusting our expectations so that we can find ways to be happy *on average* in just about any environment.

      Even if we're homeless, we can take pleasure in the little things. Or take Tom Hanks' character in the move Cast Away, in which he's stranded on an island and he survives by befriending a volleyball he calls Wilson. He adjusts to his tragic condition and finds a way to be happy. That doesn't mean he won't jump at the chance to escape.

      Likewise, Americans are proud of their country, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't seek ways to remedy glaring injustices in their society. The satire's assumption is that that society is like a powder keg: Americans have inured themselves to those injustices and inequities, but they've done this largely by repressing their rage. Demagogues like Trump are currently exploiting that dynamic, so who knows what will set off the multitude of American have-nots?

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    2. Señor Benjamin,
      The United States is such a fascinating country. What a society. Have you ever lived there? Raul from Paraguay

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    3. Hi, Raul. Buenos dias. Thanks for reading. I haven't lived there, but one of my brothers lives in South Carolina and I've visited him a few times. I've also vacationed there.

      The US is indeed very interesting, much more so than Canada in my view. I read a lot about American culture as though I were an honourary American and I can't be bothered to read even a Canadian newspaper. That's the seductive American monoculture which is vying for world supremacy.

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  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfxcTzvCAYo

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  4. From a fellow Canadian.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3g2AVZmNPY


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  5. Señor Cain,
    your blog is vry interesting but now I just wish you have a nice 2016. Please take care of yourself and drive safely. Raul from Paraguay

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