Jim Carrey Trolls Fox Angerbears, and Other News From The World Of Guns

Greetings, rabble! Welcome to this week’s sad, sad roundup of stupid gun stuff. It is only our fifth entry in this series and already every week feels like an interminable slog through the most depressing and ridiculous and rage-inducing gun-related precincts of the American id. Just this week yr Wonkette brought you these shit-covered piles of shit in Indiana, the irresponsibility of this Mensa-level genius in Utah, and the waste of life-sustaining resources that is Dana Loesch. And that was just since Friday! How much more could we have left in us?

Quite a bit, as it turns out!

The week started off quite gloriously with one Jim Carrey, who is perhaps in need of a new cause after people caught on that the whole “vaccines cause autism” trope might have been a crock of shit and his movie career went into a deep coma from which it has yet to awaken. We do not use the word "gloriously" because Carrey went over to Funny or Die to make this little parody video revolving around two dead things: Charlton Heston and Hee Haw. The video itself was amusing enough for the six minutes of our life we spent watching it, but the glory came later, with the screeching it set off amongst the gun humpers, who reacted as if Carrey had called for them to all be deported to those FEMA death camps that President Obama inexplicably refuses to build (so far as we know). (Way to disappoint your base, Nobama!)

Yes, it was a veritable who’s who of self-righteous assholes calling out an actor whose last movie anyone with taste saw in a theater was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind back in 2004. Taking particular umbrage was our old friend Greg Gutfeld, last seen in these pages doing his best impression of John Lithgow in the Twilight Zone movie and now apparently trying to increase his public profile by finding a cause that will get him lots of airtime. Gutfeld, who really needs a good shorthand nickname (Lil' Greggy Crazypants? Anger Twat?) spent most of the week sneering at Carrey on various Fox shows and trying to engage him in a Twitter war while defending them thar good ol’ Amurcan southerners Carrey had defamed –- defamed, we tell you! –- with his mocking of Hee Haw and the civil rights of gun owners to buy any gun with mega-zillion-round capacity clips at any time. Gutfeld called Carrey a “pathetic tool” and “a dirty, stinking coward” for, you know, making a video that as of this writing has been viewed 2.6 million times on Funny or Die and putting himself squarely in the crosshairs (pun definitely intended) of the full rage of right-wing nutters who have more than their share of anger and weaponry. Yep, cowardly.

Of course this whole shouting match is a nice way to avoid discussing the actual legislation that is being debated up on Capitol Hill. Congress is on its two-week Easter recess, which gives us a break from listening to Canadian anchor baby Ted Cruz mansplain the Second Amendment to us. This should at least please Greg Gutfeld’s The Five colleague Bob Beckel, who, in the same segment where Gutfeld melted down, questioned whether Jim Carrey, a stinking Canadian furriner himself, should involve himself in America’s internal politics. Well Bob, Carrey has lived in the States for thirty years and, we’re betting, probably has dual citizenship by this point, and thus has exactly the same rights to comment on gun control as you do. Bob Beckel, you have won the Token Liberal Shitmuffin on a Fox News Show Award this week for your impression of an intellectually bankrupt quisling.

Speaking of the useless dicks in our national legislature, President Obama this week tried shaming them into passing some damn gun control laws by saying it would be terrible if the country had forgotten the lessons of Newtown already. He said this the same week that Connecticut authorities released some new details about Adam Lanza and what they found in his house after the slaughter. Some of the more interesting items included over 1600 rounds of ammunition, a collection of knives and samurai swords, a gun safe in his frickin’ bedroom, and a holiday card with a check from his mom and a note suggesting he use the money to buy himself a “C183 (Firearm).” That last note is from investigators’ documentation -– we do not know that Nancy Lanza wrote the word “firearm” in her son’s Christmas card. But here is why it is important: the New York Times suggested this could be a typographical error and Nancy Lanza meant a CZ83, which is a semiautomatic pistol made by a company in the Czech Republic. Or she could really have meant a C183, which is a 14-megapixel digital camera manufactured by Kodak, which the Times reporter or the cops could have discovered with five seconds on Google. Who knows, maybe Nancy Lanza was really trying to interest Adam in a less deadly hobby that still involved the word “shooting.” Or maybe she didn’t think they had enough semiautomatic pistols in the house and wanted him to get himself a CZ83 before the company stopped importing them at the end of 2012. Just one more question that will likely never be answered, but we come down on the firearm side. Adam Lanza was a shut-in who apparently spent most of his time playing Call of Duty. He was not going to develop an interest in going out to the garden to photograph jays hanging out in a birdbath.

By the way, our favorite part of the description of the CZ83 on CZ-USA’s website is how the gun “easily handles the new generation of high-performance defensive ammo.” Defensive ammo! Isn’t that one of those oxymorons, like “jumbo shrimp” or “intelligent gun fondler?”

And speaking of the 1600 rounds of ammo being kept in Planters peanut cans by Adam Lanza, Salon this week had a story about equipment shortages in police departments across the country because so many gun fondlers are buying every bullet and gun they can find and hoarding them like squirrels saving up nuts for winter. Of course this means fewer guns and bullets for cops, who expend a great deal of ammo in particular because officers have to qualify on the range on a regular basis. And thanks to recession-induced budget cuts, the cops’ supplies of these items had already been reduced. So the people our tax dollars pay to serve and protect us non-gun-owning citizens are under-supplied because the paranoid gun owners who always think jack-booted UN shock troops are just over the next hill are stocking up in preparation. Somewhere that is going to come back to bite someone in the ass.

To close out this week’s tour through the Land of Milk and Pew! Pew!, we want to circle back to Dana Loesch and a statement she wrote in her post-Piers Morgan editorial on RedState:

(T)he atrocity at Virginia Tech was committed with illegally used handguns.

Wait, mowing down 49 people was illegal? We assume Dana meant to say illegally purchased handguns, which struck us because we seem to recall Cho had bought those guns legally. So we went back and read a bit about the case, and the answer we came up with is yes and no. To refresh your memories: a year and a half before his rampage, a state judge had called Cho “an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness” and ordered him to undergo outpatient psychiatric counseling. Had the judge committed him to a mental facility, Cho would have lost his right to buy guns in Virginia. But -– here is where it gets tricky –- the judge’s ruling should have been enough to get Cho added to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System and red-flagged him when federally licensed dealers ran a background check. However, Virginia was not required to submit the info about Cho’s mental health to the NICS (you can thank the Supreme Court for relieving states of that burden) and had never done so, either because of bureaucratic loopholes, tragic oversight, lack of funds, or possibly plain old DERP DERP GUNZ R FREEDOM! So Cho passed his federal background check with flying colors, and a few weeks later 32 people were dead.

The Virginia Tech massacre was enough to get a bill through Congress, which President Bush signed into law, to tighten up some of those loopholes and give the states some funds to assist in getting mental health records to the NICS. The NRA actually went along with that one, not without some screaming and yelling of course, but probably happy to put the blame on a person with mental illness, and not examine the larger question of why our culture fetishizes guns to such a degree that a person with mental illness -– or even just a person who is mentally sound but just kind of an asshole -– would find shooting another person an easy and justifiable solution to begin with.