We have voted and we have debated. And here we are with 120.5 civilian guns per 100 people and an endless stream of gun violence and school shootings. Gunshot wounds are now the leading cause of child death in the United States.
Peaceful marches are powerful and energizing. But even after children who survived the Parkland school shooting shamed us with their mass protests, we are still sending thoughts and prayers. In the fight against gun violence, civility has gotten us dick.
But there’s another path that’s proven effective in the last two years. That’s going absolutely off the fucking rails. Consider: Rambling about crackpot theories, screaming into the microphone at school board meetings and pitching violent toddler fits at supermarkets and dental offices have collectively moved the powers that be to yield to anti-maskers.
A massive body of scientific research was no match for howling anti-vaxers and now our kids are in public schools without COVID vaccine requirements. Obstructing public meetings by yelling and harassing public officials has kept this country from doing all it can to fight a deadly virus for which we have vaccines and simple preventative measures. Despite a million dead. This shit works.
Is the swearing bothering you? Cool. Write a letter. Stand up and bravely use your voice to complain about me offending your sensibilities with my foul mouth instead calling or writing local, state and federal representatives or the NRA because I guess a woman writing the word “fuck” is more offensive than 19 children shot dead in a single school room, their ruined bodies identified by the DNA from the cheek swabs of their crying parents outside. Fuck you.
Maybe my tone is alienating. Maybe you could have been on board with legislation that would have kept a few more children from bleeding out in classrooms and folks on grocery runs from gasping their last bloody breaths into the linoleum because someone with a gun that didn’t even need to reload shot them up at the market if I wasn’t so abrasive.
Well, if the sweet faces of the children who died in Texas — Jesus, at Sandy Hook a decade ago — aren’t enough to win you over to protecting living, breathing people from random, brutal violence, I doubt I ever had a chance.
Back to the screaming. Airlines shrugged off the concerns of their staff and flight attendants and pushed for lifting masking rules because a segment of their customers were pissing themselves with rage and high off their imagined oppression to the point of attacking people in goddamn coach.
Looking at the videos of Karens and Kens making absolute asses of themselves in public, spitting and shaking and escalating to avoid wearing a 2-millimeter-thick mask — what could be more humiliating? Wait, I know: Continuing to go to work and pay taxes in a country that chooses its obsession with guns over the lives of adults and children alike every single fucking day.
If you’re waiting for me to attempt to persuade you with statistics or studies, please hold your breath forever. At this point, if you think legislation — fucking any legislation — that would even slow the flood of guns into the American melee isn’t necessary, I can’t help you.
If you refuse to see what every other nation in the world can and respond to it like the emergency it is, fuck off. If you’re not willing to admit to a difference between a hunting rifle and the kind of weapon engineered to mow down soldiers from 600 yards, fuck off.
I no longer have the time or energy to engage with willfully obtuse or dishonest people who just want what they want. Feel free to ramble about how this is a mental health crisis and not about people in mental crisis getting guns easier than a driver’s license because right now I’m busy thinking about the mental health of little kids and teachers practicing active shooter drills and the thousands of parents who bury children killed by guns each year. Not even the adults. Just the children. Oh, should I not politicize their deaths? Eat shit. Actual shit.
Protesting outside Brett Kavanaugh’s home led to swift, bipartisan legislation protecting him and other U.S. Supreme Court justices. But that’s organized. That’s a unified and coordinated protest. What I’m talking about is the slow drip of crazy, where you see someone in a normal setting and your hackles go up because something about their T-shirt slogan tells you they are about to pop off at the first available opportunity. I’m talking about a relentless campaign of dispersed fury. No justice, no peace goddamn anywhere.
This op-ed originally ran in the North Coast Journal, where the author works as the arts and features editor.
This work by Queen City Nerve is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
If we’ve voted, isn’t that democracy?
If we’re debating, how and why does the author claim authority to end the debate?
Civility is futile? When have leftists shown civility? When has the author? She’s a foulmouthed ranter.
Anti-maskers? Masks don’t work. This has been stated, demonstrated, proven and now admitted by actual medical types and government medical types ie bureaucrats like the CDC and NIH. Pointing out that things don’t work may be ‘anti’ but it’s also rational.
I thought the author was in favor of incivility and shouting? My, my she does change her tune often.
Masks don’t work. And, as is being proven and admitted every day by the people who developed, administered and took them, neither do the vaccines. In fact, they are now proving to be deleterious in resisting covid. In other words, the more shots you get the less protected you are. Oh dear. The literature is vast and growing on the subject. Pharma execs are starting to come clean.
This s*** works? Not at all.
A woman can write the f-word all day long if she likes. It isn’t persuasive. It isn’t even particularly noteworthy. It’s a juvenile look-at-me stunt but doesn’t add an ounce of veracity to her writing.
Alienating tone? No, just pathetic. And familiar. This is what seems to pass for essay writing among those ruled entirely by emotion but who claim their frenzy is somehow rational.
Guns don’t need to reload? Which guns are those? If they don’t need to reload why are there spare magazines and extra cartridges?
People in jails and mental institutions don’t commit random, brutal violence. Because they’re in jails and mental institutions. Leftists – including leftists controlling law enforcement, prosecutors’ offices, parole boards and psychiatric panels have been working feverishly to close both or place as many of their inmates and patients on the streets. And here we are.
The statement about airlines is simply false. Pilots and flight attendants were as resistant to masks as any passenger and said so, especially because they had to wear the useless articles every day. They also knew that air in the cabins was circulated completely every 20-30 minutes and passed through high-end filters. Many probably also knew that masks were medically useless in stopping a virus.
A 2-millimeter thick mask? Sounds flimsy. Is she sure it does anything? Is she sure it CAN do anything? If it does something (at all) then why didn’t 2+ years of mask wearing in cities, states and nations around the world prevent covid transmission, illness and death? Why didn’t mask wearing on airplanes achieve this result? Despite her fallacious dramatic examples of passengers misbehaving, the vast majority of air passengers wore masks as directed. It achieved nothing.
No, we aren’t waiting for statistics to persuade us. The writer has already demonstrated she’s incapable of persuasion with or without them. This is a child’s tantrum.
Legislation produces…laws. Laws are the rules by which a society operates and a government may infringe on freedoms if and when someone violates the law. If she doesn’t want legislation and guns would enter the country anyway, then what, exactly, does she want? And does she realize the contradiction invalidates her point?
Other nations aren’t the US and don’t have the US Constitution or the US Code. ‘What foreign nations think of us’ is a tired straw man fallacy.
It certainly is a mental health crisis since – wait for it – persons committing these violent acts are mentally ill, as subsequent examinations and trials demonstrate.
The writer cares more than us. Or thinks she does. Or wants us to believe, anyway. But isn’t she the same writer who’s been cursing us in unrelenting fashion until now?
Well, that was a bizarre, pointless run in a very large circle.
The writer doesn’t care what we think but spills oceans of ink trying to change what we think.
She wants killers preventing from killing but refuses to countenance the realities of who the killers are and why they kill.
Somehow, covid got dragged into this anti-gun rant for no apparent reason other than one Jennifer Fumiko Cahill is incensed that complete and total fealty to the state, including ‘public health,’ is being resisted or merely questioned, even as the state fails its most basic function ie protection of the public on both the public safety and public health fronts.
Government, as usual, is failing miserably. But Jennifer is angry with the people who had nothing to do with the failure.
Jennifer is confused. But given her level of free-floating rage, irrational is more accurate. Especially her writing full of the naughty words she takes inordinate pride in.