The Week in Guns: Please Proceed With Your Mansplaining, Jerks

What a week for gun news to wrap our cold dead hands around. We have already told you about the dust-up in the Senate Judiciary Committee when Canadian anchor baby Ted Cruz (R-Pew! Pew!) mansplained the Constitution to Dianne Feinstein and DiFi told him to STFU and DIAF. Readers who know something about DiFi’s history know she became mayor of San Francisco in 1978 when George Moscone was shot to death along with Harvey Milk, an experience she mentioned in the course of telling the CAB to STFU and DIAF. Last week’s exchange led Glenn “Gotta Cut Footloose” Reynolds to posit that DiFi’s work on gun control is being driven by PTSD and not rational policymaking. A lawmaker bringing personal experience to bear on a policy position? Is this not the same thing for which the Instaputz was defending Rob Portman’s honor over his flip-flop on gay marriage against vicious leftists? Why, yes it is, and on the same day he was suggesting DiFi might be suffering from PTSD. Good job, Instaputz.

As a counter to Glenn Reynolds’ slagging DiFi for being irrational about guns, because Lord knows no one else in America gets irrational over those fucking things, we thought this profile of former Marine Timothy McLaughlin and his experiences participating in the invasion of Iraq was notable particularly for his comments on being diagnosed with PTSD. It is always this mysterious paradox with libertarians that gets us wondering what would be the result of the irresistible force of human events meeting their immovable smugness. Would witnessing close friends or loved ones shot and killed be enough to break through the Instaputz’s firewall of rationality and cause an actual human moment of empathy to penetrate that giant brain, or at this point is he permanently an asshole?

And if you have not yet seen Rachel Maddow’s epic rant against Ted Cruz and his patronizing bullshit, you should watch it, because it is awesome.

Let us expend no more psychic energy on this while we still have some left to direct at Cody Wilson, law student, libertarian, and all-around, like, awesome bro. Cody is a co-founder of something called Defense Distributed, where he and his like-minded coterie of Ron Paul fellatists want “to produce and publish information related to the 3D printing of firearms,” which is a fairly sterile way of saying they want to make it easy-peasy-lemon-squeezey for anyone to create semi-automatics and high-capacity clips using a 3-D printer. The “Manifesto” link on Defense Distributed’s website leads to this transcript of John Milton’s Areopagitica - For The Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, a full-throated defense of freedom of speech and indictment of censorship written in 1644 and directed at the British Parliament. Cody, you’re mixing up your amendments here. But even if we indulge your little argument that the Second Amendment gives you as much right to print working firearms out of a 3-D printer as the First Amendment gives you to print out a copy of, say, The Turner Diaries, we will remind you that we do still put some restrictions on freedom of speech when it endangers the public unnecessarily. Like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, for instance. Try that sometime, use “freedom of speech” as a defense when someone gets trampled to death, and let us know where that gets you.

Not surprisingly, in the videos he has uploaded to YouTube, Cody comes off as a self-centered juvenile sneer machine who mostly seems concerned with how government wants to take away his guns because it wants future America to look like a dystopian novel filled with a meek and cowering populace being crushed under the jackboot of authority, and not because it might be concerned with all the people out there who keep getting, you know, shot. But Cody has read Foucault and Kafka, so he knows what’s what. Cody, from us to you: you are in your twenties, so it is time to discover girls already.

Honestly, we do not understand how these people can wake up every morning so damn terrified of everything. If it is not the government, it is the hordes of gangbangers who will swarm the streets of California’s cities after the Big One, preying on poor innocent non-gun-owning individuals, stealing their food, kicking their puppies, dragging their women by the hair back to the barrios to ravage them in most indelicate ways…all for the want of an AR-15. But of course this scenario will come to pass if the damn hippies in Sacramento have their way and pass a bunch of gun-control measures that the public just happens to overwhelmingly support. California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, many enacted in the 20 years after a 1989 school shooting in Stockton, when a nut sprayed a playground with an AK-47 and killed five kids and a teacher. And as those laws have gone into effect, the state’s gun mortality rate has fallen by more than half. Sure, the gun control laws do not deserve all the credit, but they don’t seem to have hurt.

Yeah yeah, Mr. Doug Codrea, we know: New Orleans, Katrina, Ham Biscuits. We covered this last week. The crazy assholes to fear in New Orleans when the floodwaters were rising were the ones who had badges to go along with their guns. We live in California and we’re pretty happy with legislators making an effort to keep guns out of the hands of convicted sex offenders and the mentally ill. Even if we did fall into one of those categories, we are pretty sure we could get a gun if we really wanted one, it just might take a little more effort. In the meantime, you not being able to buy all the boxes of .50-cal ammo you can carry at the local Big 5 is far from the worst of fates. For your neighbors, in fact, it is a reason for gratitude.

Being afraid all the time is how the NRA stays in business, that and playing the victim card, as Wayne LaPierre did in his speech at CPAC this weekend. We made it through the first third of this spectacle of self-pity before deciding we had toured enough of the more paranoid precincts of the world of gun fetishists this week. Everyone stay safe out there, and remember that an armed society is a polite, terrified, gobbling-Xanax-by-the-fistful society.