Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, May 30, 2022

"Now Is Not The Time..."

 The reflexive position of the GOP when their governing choices are thrown into horrifying perspective is to decry "second guessing" the police or "politicizing the tragedy." The failures of the police in Uvalde will be the running focus of many, but the GOP has been caught between the cult they created around the police in response to the Floyd murder and their need to deflect the conversation from guns.

I've seen a lot of Facebook posts talking about how we won't solve guns without campaign finance reform.

I think that is wrong. The NRA is bankrupt and deprived of its Russian cash pipeline. The GOP does not need NRA money, it needs gun fetishist voters. The reason why the GOP will not budge on guns is for the same reason that they won't divorce themselves from Trump: their voters won't let them. 

Saying the problem is money is reassuring to our sense of decency, whereas acknowledging that 35-40% of our fellow countrymen are willing to regularly sacrifice schoolchildren rather than have any regulations on firepower is deeply unsettling.

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