If Jesus himself came back today and condemned gun ownership- well, they would shoot him.

Not all Americans, just the ones we tend to conveniently lump together as rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, Deplorables or whatever your favorite cultural slur du jour happens to be. They want guns to kill those they find threaten them, those that will come one day to steal their stuff, or rape their wimmen, or take over their country. Or, heaven forbid, lower their property values.

They are convinced that black people will come after them to punish them (whites) for the way they treated blacks for centuries. They are a vengeful spiteful culture so they naturally suspect all other cultures are the same. And it is a cultural thing, not a racial thing, not all whites are like that, any more than all black or brown people are innocent, blameless, noble and oppressed victims.

These are a people who have been ground down by a brutal capitalism, a prudish and perverse sexual repression, a hysterical religion and a long history of second class citizenship and industrial servitude going back for centuries. They were primarily the white Scotch-Irish peasant classes and wage slaves of the American South, with a history of forced emigration and dislocation that can be traced back to the Saxon refugees from Norman Britain, the Border Country, Northern Ireland and finally the American Piedmont. And when they got here, they found the aristocrats had already established themselves as landed gentry on the east coast so they were forced to become a permanent servant class below all (except the slaves), or banished to the desolate wilderness of the Appalachians.

But now they have migrated and insinuated themselves into every corner and every class of the nation, and have succeeded in transmitting their disease of envy and hatred into succeeding waves of white immigrants from the rest of Europe.

They despise “the elites”, but they have been seduced into thinking they can inherit the mantle of leadership from the very classes that brutalized them, so they dare not attack or blame them–they want to become them. Instead, they lavish their hatred on those they see below them, beneath them: the black, the Hispanic, the gay, the foreigner, the Jew, the educated and intellectual. Any one who has either failed, or refused, to adopt the cultural markers they feel identify and ennoble them.

These are the spiritual sons of Johnny Reb, who enlisted in the CSA to fight for freedom, the freedom to own and exploit his own slaves. Well, he never got them, did he? And if his side had won, they still wouldn’t have them. The planter aristocracy that fired on Ft Sumter had no intention of sharing their wealth, they only wanted to perpetuate it indefinitely.

I know I’ve mentioned this here ad nauseam, but I can’t stress it too much. I know what I’m talking about, I’ve known it ever since I was a kid. I was born and raised in this culture, but I was an outsider and never fully accepted by it. This gave me the advantage of both closeness and perspective. I know how these people think, I know who they are, and I know all the tricks and subterfuges they use to hide this ugly truth from others, and even from themselves. I speak their language fluently but it was not my mother tongue. I could see what was going on around me because I saw it with wide open and fresh eyes.

And when they realize they aren’t going to be able to use their guns to drive off these inferior races and creeds that are invading their country, they go berserk and murder each other. This has always been a toxic and malignant subculture, but now it is one that has realized it is increasingly irrelevant and soon to vanish altogether. It will not go quietly.

I am NOT going to use the evil acts of a handful of people to diminish the God-given rights of my fellow Texans. Period. None of these so-called gun-control solutions will work to stop a person with evil intent. 2/6

tweet by Texas rep Matt Schaefer (R-of course) (@RepMattSchaefer) September 1, 2019

David Atkins of Washington Monthly, in an essay on AlterNet, has some thoughts on evil:

If human evil is the ultimate cause of gun violence–rather than the shocking ease with which modern firearms allow tense situations to escalate into deadly violence and unbalanced individuals to become mass murderers in a matter of seconds–then presumably there must be more bad people in America than anywhere else in the world.

It’s not clear to me if American evangelicals who tout this line about “evil” in the context of gun violence have spent even a few seconds thinking it through. Perhaps they haven’t stopped to consider why evil doesn’t seem to manifest this way in other developed countries. Perhaps they haven’t asked themselves why America seems to be beset by so much more human evil despite being much more religious than most other developed countries. Are the bodies of murdered children just part of God’s benevolent plan in divinely inspiring the 2nd Amendment, or are Americans unique in being especially susceptible to the wiles of the Devil? And why should that be?