ONE NAKED FARMER (1NF)

Monday, July 4, 2022

My Independence Day Message To Gun Nuts Everywhere

I'm tired of hearing about how carrying guns in public is some declaration of our rights. It's just a way to make people more afraid and used to living in their self-made prison.

By Karoli Kuns — July 2, 2014

Independence Day: When we celebrate the nation's independence by shooting projectiles into the air intended to resemble 'bombs bursting in air.' Or something.

Wouldn't it be great to celebrate the nation's independence by actually living in a society that cared about liberty for everyone instead of just white, gun-toting Christian conservatives?

Let's be honest. States that glorify guns as implements of liberty aren't promoting freedom; they're promoting fear. The best we can hope in their vision of liberty is not to be in the line of fire when someone unloads a few rounds into someone else they're pissed at.

How twisted is it to define liberty as having the right to inflict fear, harm and possible death on someone else?

A life free of paranoia and fear feels much more like independence. Living afraid to go to the movies, the mall, or even out to a fast food restaurant feels much more like prison.

The open carry whackos driven by their need to sport their penises guns in public aren't proclaiming liberty. They're claiming their right to intimidate other people and minimize others' rights in favor of their own. Desensitize everyone, and no one will notice when they start using them to bully people of color, women, and other groups they conquer, right?

News flash: It's not liberty to sacrifice 20 children for one insane person's right to carry a weapon of mass death. It's not liberty for college students to be dead because an entitled, bitter student decided to go out in a blaze of glory. That's not liberty and it's sure as hell not freedom.

They want us all to believe we have to have guns to be free. I don't believe that. I never have, and I never will.

This Independence Day, I'm declaring mine. I won't visit states with laws permitting open carry and I won't patronize national businesses that permit it. We don't have to live by their rules, even if they have guns and I don't. But I'm not stopping there. If they want liberty, they can start by being responsible and considerate of others.

They can leave their guns at home, locked up with the key in their pocket. Liberty is choosing to respect other people, not trampling all over them.

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SOME QUOTES

MARGARET ATWOOD

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

DOROTHY ALLISON

If it’s true, I have the absolute right to terrify you with it.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hate in the world is religion and organized religion. Absolutely convinced of that. And I think it should be - religion - treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt.

So when I say that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity.

It says we can’t be moral without “Big Brother,” without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another without this. It means we must be afraid.

We must also be forced to love someone whom we fear - the essence of sado-masochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the Master/Slave relationship. And that it knows death is coming, and can’t wait to bring it on.

I say that is Evil.

And though I do, some nights, stay home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and this ultimate stupidity.

JACK LONDON

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time living.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

STEPHEN BATCHELOR

It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored. How extraordinary it is to be here at all!

DOROTHY PARKER

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

There’s no right answer to the wrong question. Now what do we do?

CARL SAGAN

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.

When the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites - now down to 10 seconds or less - lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

MARGARET MEAD

It seems to me very important to continue to distinguish between two evils. It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.