Every time there’s a mass shooting, voices from the right blame the left, citing “gun control” as an obstacle to the solution. Yet, with over 400,000,000 guns in American homes, obviously no serious gun control has ever taken place. We are, in fact, armed to the teeth.
The left has this ”crazy” idea that owning deadly force should require comprehensive background checks to limit the access that allowed young murderers in Uvalde and Highland Park to purchase weapons without any obstacles. And that military-grade assault weapons have no place in the private sector.
Challenging that reasoning are Congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Margorie Taylor-Greene who recently shared Tweets stating liberals “will stop at nothing” to “take away our freedoms” in what they’ve called a left-wing conspiracy to disarm right-wing patriots defending our Constitution. Presumably the same right-wing patriots that trampled on our Constitution.
If that wasn’t such a grotesque aberration of rationality, it would be downright humorous.
Boebert maintains that the left-born idea of “defunding the police” also exacerbates gun violence.
It’s difficult to overcome a bad title, but “defunding” doesn’t mean reducing police effectiveness. It means to divert some funds toward community programs that can aid the police by preventing violence. Thereby focusing police responsibilities onto actual police work rather than also settling domestic disputes and filing accident reports.
Guns are only the tip of America’s incendiary iceberg. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis claims that “woke culture” is destroying America. Never mind that “woke” simply means to be awakened to inequalities revealed from systemic inequities.
DeSantis believes Americans are angered to violence because of confusion over gender identification, and, God forbid, having to adjust their salutations to respect differences.
Without a doubt, “woke culture” shakes up the status quo, but so has every emancipation throughout our history. “Wokeness” also rejects nuance and context and casts a net too wide for clarity, but it is, nevertheless, a manifestation of awareness with the intention to expand justice and compassion.
Republicans appear frightened by justice regarding civil rights, immigration, cultural respect, and even economic disparity. Their fears also reject the examination of systemic issues of racism and sexism, and the idea that maybe, just maybe, the planet is not an unlimited resource provided by God for humans to mine, strip and pollute.
The same cognitive distortion leads many to believe that liberals kill babies. Again, never mind that the pro-life movement did not begin from a moral conviction, but from an expedientone. It was a political and religious coalition in the 70’s to lure Catholic Democrats and to rally conservatives with a cause.
Most Republicans had supported or at least accepted Roe V Wade. Today most Americans continue to support a woman’s right to choose, but the ironic “personal freedom” espousing conservatives gerrymandered, manipulated and manufactured big government to wrestrepresentation from the people.
This new right is a movement of antiquated conservatism drawing false conclusions from a myopic lens on history. And moral chaos in America will not subside until acceptance and reason replace the theocratic dogma and fear that views the expansion of understanding as their enemy.
