Nationwide —There is no government.
According to the heralded founding fathers who brainstormed and borrowed ideas to create the framework of America, the Constitution was written to “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Before they even laid out the missive that still guides this 243-year-old kinda-democratic nation, they spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, for all to see, their vision of what a government looks like. They wrote that “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government…”
While the existence of liberty and the pursuit of happiness are arguable, there is no doubt that America’s addiction to the tools of death has turned the “life” portion of that God-ordained trio of rights into a theoretical notion. If there was any semblance of what anyone would call a government, the teachers of our “posterity” wouldn’t have to set aside a little time between social studies and language arts to practice drills for not getting shot in the face with weapons of war. But the men and women in Washington have bartered away their responsibility to ensure domestic tranquility. The elected Senators and Congressperson are only willing to promote the general welfare of gun manufacturers. The consent of the governed is no longer their concern; so again:
There is no government.
Because, if there was, they would do something about the 289 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. If there was a government, they wouldn’t have to formulate a plan to reduce the 20,088 firearm deaths and injuries this year. If there was a government, they wouldn’t have to concoct a revolutionary solution to combat the country’s 38,000 gun-related deaths.
I’m sure there is at least one Democrat reading this, righteously proclaiming: “Not all politicians.” But if our representatives, Democrats or Republicans, were anything more than repositories for campaign donations, we wouldn’t have more mass shootings than days this year. If Democrats wanted to stop gun violence, they’d shut down the entire government until they got a vote on gun reform. Democrats did it for DACA. Republicans did it for a wall. But I guess face-shooting is not as important as immigration.
No, you don’t have a Senator or a member of Congress. You don’t have a governor or a president. They are all just mouth-breathers and blowhards. Because there is no government to protect us. We are on our own.
And I know that it’s easy to complain about the current state of face-shooting while not offering any solutions but fixing this specific issue doesn’t require any innovative ideas. We already know what we need to fix this problem and we have a surplus.
We need to harvest the power of racism.
According to Statista Research Department, 65 of the 114 mass shooters from 1982 to August 2019 were white. If our government employed the same racist approach to gun control as we did with the following issues, we’d have this issue fixed by tomorrow.
Black Protesters
The most-hated three words in the English language are “Black Lives Matter,” followed by “Colin Kaepernick kneeling.” From COINTELPRO during the Civil Rights Movement to computer software for the movement for black lives, America has used every law enforcement resource in America to combat black protests including undercover cops, monitoring activists’ social media accounts and designating people as “Black Identity Extremists” (even though they can’t seem to find any).
In June, FBI director Christopher “Ray-Ray” Wray told the Senate that most of the domestic terrorism cases his agency has investigated during this fiscal year were related to white supremacists. This was after experts admitted before a House Committee that white terrorists were the problem, not Black Lives Matter.
According to a Marist Poll, 50 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Black Lives Matter while only 42 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the NRA, according to a Fox News poll. But our esteemed president has never called a mass shooter a “son of a bitch.” Congressional leaders, Democrat or Republican, have yet to show up at a Black Lives Matter event. Could you imagine what would happen if Obama gave the keynote address at a Black Lives Matter event the same way Trump did with the NRA?
The question is, why?
The government has never convicted a Black Identity Extremist. Black Lives Matter has accounted for zero deaths. Still, it constantly vilifies any form of black protest. You’re more likely to get a background check going to a protest rally than you would if you were buying an assault rifle.
They should keep that same energy.
Drugs
One of the most egregious examples of racial bias in the criminal justice system is the war on drugs. If we treated white school shooters like we demonized black boys during the crack epidemic, we could probably curb many of the mass shootings in America. If that sounds unfair, an ACLU report used numbers from the National Survey on Drugs and Mental Health along with U.S. Sentencing Commission data to reveal that 66 percent of crack users in 2004 were white or Hispanic but 80 percent of the people sentenced to federal prisons that year for crack cocaine were black.
Maybe President Trump should could have a press conference as George H.W. Bush did in 1989 to announce the reboot of the War on Drugs. But instead of pulling out a bag of crack they bought off a black teenager as the Bush administration did to explain the epidemic “in the projects,” perhaps Trump could pull out an AR-15 and explain what’s going on in Whitelandia.
Now, I’m not trying to demonize white people (I’m sure they can handle that themselves). I’m just pointing out that bullets don’t discriminate against white people. So maybe we can use the same approach that we used when opioids started affecting white people and—instead of a “war on drugs”, we can rename gun violence a “public health crisis.”
In 2017, 17,023 people died from prescription opioids,15,482 people died from heroin and another 13,942 died from cocaine overdoses according to the Centers for Disease Control.
That same year 39,333 people died from firearms according to the CDC.
I bet Kellyanne Conway could fix our gun issue.
She fixed that whole opioid thing, right?
Speaking of public health crises…
AIDS
Remember when America thought AIDS was a gay disease? The government closed down bathhouses, raided gay clubs and issued warnings against homosexual sex. The entire country’s efforts were “uncoordinated, insufficient and inadequate,” until HIV began affecting white, heterosexual people, according to peer-reviewed studies.
White people were cool with gun violence as long as it was relegated to Chicago and “da hood.” But when white kids started to get mowed down by pasty, disgruntled incels with machine guns, America woke up out of its apathetic slumber and decided to do something. Knowing this, we should work on preventing gunshots the same way we addressed HIV. It is only recently that trauma doctors have begun calling for gun control even though black doctors at hospitals located mostly in what white people call “inner cities,” (where black people live) has been creating programs focused on violence prevention for more than a quarter-century.
But you know…we don’t focus on black-on-black crime.
The government works hard to prevent HIV from spreading because it affects so many people. An estimated 37,000 new cases of HIV are diagnosed every year, according to the CDC.
The same agency reports that 100,000 people are injured by firearms every year.
Immigration
We have successfully created a country where immigrants are vilified more than machines of war. White people are terrified of MS-13, border crossers and roving bands of Mexican rapists but every bit of data shows us that gun violence affects us more than the hated “illegal immigrants.”
The Trump administration has moved billions of dollars in funds from the Pentagon and FEMA to build a stupid wall but allows the NRA to dictate gun policy. If only our commander in chief were willing to fearmonger against firearms as he does with immigrants, we’d solve this issue by next Tuesday. I would never advocate locking children in cages. But if white kids keep shooting up schools, perhaps we should consider locking up white kids who wear trench coats and listen to death metal.
I’m just saying…We already have a system in place.
The research journal Criminology published research proving that crime decreases when the population of undocumented immigrants increases. And the Cato Institute found that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born citizens. Meanwhile, In Texas, native-born Texans commit sex crimes at a rate of 5.4 per 100,000, while immigrants commit sex crimes at a rate 0f 2.1 per 100,000, disproving Trump’s “Mexican rapist” claim.
According to the CDC, Texas’ firearm death rate is 12.4 per 100,000.
Maybe we need a wall around gun manufacturers.
I sincerely hope these suggestions are taken in the manner in which they were intended. It was not meant as a form of rebuke or white shaming. I am just trying to offer solutions. It might be hard for us to convince white people to give up their guns, but if we used the precedent of how America treats black people and applied those principles to our attitudes on guns, our government might reach a logical consensus.
That is…
If we had a government.
