#Gun Control

Their Call of Duty – Their Cold, Dead Hands

The country of mutually supportive consumerism and militarism is the country that sells (or did sell until last week) Bushmaster rifles at Wal-Mart for the gun-loving consumer. That country is the same country that spends and makes billions producing and promoting the eternal arsenal of democracy; is the same country that is called upon or calls upon itself to provide globe-spanning security for itself and imitators; is the country that via nuclear weapons held the entire world hostage on behalf of its “way of life”; and is the same country that also invests and returns billions producing and promoting the likes of Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed – and two, three, many more sequels each. Maybe it is all coincidence, or maybe we Americans kill with guns at obscenely high rates because, for complex reasons, we have become or remain highly proficient killers, possibly the world’s experts on killing or at least on certain means and methods.

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Society of the First-Person Shooter

A constitutional democracy expresses and validates its moral decisions through its lawmaking, but not if the decisions the laws are meant to embody have never actually occurred. If the turning point represents an actual moral commitment, and a turning to each other that also crosses current cultural and religious divides, then we can let the wonks tell themselves that it was really the Semi-Automatic Weapons Control Act of 2013 or 2017 or 2027 that finally put an end to the Auroras and Sandy Hooks and Oak Creeks and Tucsons, but it will have been, and will have had to have been, something far more important than any piece of legislation.

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