Take Guns Away, But Only From Gun Nuts
Innocent people, artists and musicians, are shot dead in Seattle yesterday at a Cafe Racer, a place I know well; then I made the mistake of glancing at the newspaper comments. Droves of obsessive gun aficionados responded to intense personal grief with extremist political aggression and delusions of victimhood.
It's profoundly repulsive. If they have no basic human empathy, they can at least STFU for 24 hours.
posted by JAB at 10:21 AM
6 Comments:
My favorite question to pose to a gun nut: "What would Freud say?"
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Glad you're ok, FSL.
I'm idly wondering how many of these nuts are identifiably pathological narcissists?
Gun ownership test here...
I got a 5. Can you even buy a gun with a 5?
At a party yesterday and met one of the musicians who lost two friends in his band. I've heard from other people who knew the lost, and from others know the shooter.
That cafe/bar is one of those places full of honest music and joyful life, and without the stain of predigested soul-sucking corporate bullshit. The scene there- not uncommon in Seattle- would be recognizable to anyone in the last 400 years involved in ideas and the arts: a culturally potent combination of the marginalized and the accomplished. Coffee and booze and music, people who still remember how to have an actual conversation, and value music for its own sake. Lots of semi-retired rock stars doing the music they later grew into. Drawing sessions upstairs. Stunning neo-rockabilly girls, domesticated hobos, unreformed graduate students.
The immediate motivation of the killer, was his social exclusion; he went off on a group of retired UW professors last week and was kicked out.
I suspect that to a man on the edge of psychotic madness, his disintegrating acceptance among this appealing group was so important, it seemed worth destroying everything when it was taken away. This same feeling, plus obsessive acculturation to guns, mechanical power substituting for social ability, is the core of almost every school shooting.
The killer had two concealed weapons permits. An unhealthy love of guns is distinct from a genuine interest and respect. The guns amplified an impulse to violence into multiple deaths.
If there is any argument that makes me want to slap someone across the face with a sockful of dog shit, it's the "if only the room was full of responsible gun owners." By which they mean, if 'only I had been there to indulge my fantasies of killing rationalized by legitimate punishment,' a bit like slapping someone deserving across the face with a sockful of dog shit.
That social marginalization is a pretty strong theme in these things. In Viking times if you marginalized someone they stayed marginalized. In modern times they can come back and take out a room full of people with an appliance that costs less than a smartphone.
Scary stuff because we are manufacturing these people en masse.
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