No Hero
Please, tell me more about these “good guys with guns” you speak so frequently about.
Who are they? What socio-economic demographic do they come from?
How would I know one to see one?
Oh right. You can’t. Because they’re a myth. I might as well have asked you to wrangle me up a sasquatch.
Spare me please your hyperbolic rhetoric about your amendment rights and your need for protection. I’ve heard them all before, and they carry less water than a bucket made out of cheesecloth. Instead of blustering, expend that energy considering this: what kind of life choices have you made where you need a high-powered assault weapon to protect yourself from the enemies you’ve accumulated?
Yes, yes, I know: you think you’re one of these “good guys with guns,” ever-vigilant against the omnipresent-yet-ill-defined threats to the safety and well-being of the body public. Never mind that we already have police and military services for that; you, good sir, are the vanguard of defense against the unknown barbarians surely closing on our gates, and even the ones who live inside. You’re the gunslinging loner, protecting the town from the bandits.
Except it’s not them I’m afraid of. It’s you.
Because you’re not the good guy. You’re the villain.
Setting aside the ridiculousness of this fantasy, let me tell you what you’re telling me – and the world – with your “good guy” rhetoric. In this country, you are overwhelmingly more likely to be assaulted, robbed, burglarized, battered, raped, and murdered by someone you know. Not necessarily an intimate friend or even a casual acquaintance, but still someone you’re familiar with. The plumber who came in to repair a broken pipe. The guy who comes by to clean the pool once a week. That friend of your sister’s whom you see at social gatherings every now and then.
So what I hear, when you talk about being a “good guy,” about needing a gun to “protect yourself” is this: there are people in this world, whose hands you’ve shook, whose eyes you’ve looked into while you said, “hello” whom you’ve decided you are emotionally fine with killing.
You’ve already rated their lives as worth less than yours.
That’s sociopathic thinking, and it terrifies me.
The canard used by gun-rights activists is that tighter restrictions will unfairly punish “law-abiding gun owners.” But you know what? Every single mass-shooter in this country was a law-abiding gun owner, until the moment came when they decided not to be.
Until they decided that because they were so morally justified in their actions that the law no longer belonged to them, and they could use their guns as they wished.
Because in their heads they are also “good guys.”
So what the rest of us are left to wonder is, when will the day come in which you decide the same?
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