Spoiler: It’s their shamelessness
On Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden said that the president was willing to consider executive orders to help fight gun violence. Biden was purposely vague to remind Congress that if they didn’t act they would end up with some of the president’s solutions — like comprehensive background checks, some restrictions on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and research into gun violence.
Nothing even close to confiscation, of course.
But Republicans immediately went there. And by “there,” I mean straight to the darkest place human being can go while clothed.
Within the hour, the Drudge Report had this image of Hitler and Stalin as if everyone was supposed to know that the only reason they could kill millions of their own citizens because they didn’t have Ted Nugent to defend them. A ridiculously specious claim.
As someone who was raised Jewish, I spent a lot of my child starring at black and white photos of bald, emaciated children who, I was told, could have easily been me. I met countless Holocaust survivors, all of whom emphasized no one believed that the rumors of concentration camps were true until they were being marched into one.
But Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro goes on CNN and says, “I fear the possibility of a tyranny rising in the country in the next fifty to a hundred years. Let me tell you something, Piers. The fact that my grandparents and great grandparents in Europe didn’t fear that is why they’re now ashes in Europe.”
Call me an American Exceptionalist, but I just don’t think the only thing that’s stopping us from becoming Nazi Germany is regulating weapons the way Canada does.
(Just as I don’t believe that would limit my freedom to have a universal healthcare system as intelligent as Canada’s.)
If you think guns are the only thing keeping us free, you should probably know the person most likely to be killed by your gun is you or your family.
You can say one thing for sure. Slavery wouldn’t have lasted 200 years in this country if white people didn’t have guns.
Hitler and Stalin could only do what they did because they had guns.
Would arming the Jews have prevented an army of millions from rounding them up? There were Jews who took up arms, particular in the ghettos of Warsaw. But there could never have been enough guns. And to trivialize the deaths of 11 million because you want to be able to sell guns at a gun show without background check is beyond shameless. As is presuming what your grandparents were thinking in post-World War I Europe, but the guy works for Breitbart. Shamelessness is his gig.
No right in this country is as protected as the right to be an armed white guy who tells women how to live. But guess who screams about tyranny?
Should Planned Parenthood conjure the Nazis (Yes, the Nazis were anti-abortion) every time Republicans suggest a new law limiting women’s health. Should LGBT Americans conjure the Nazi’s brutal intolerance of non-“heterosexual” behavior whenever the right tries to use the government to decide who Americans can marry?
That kind of shamelessness works — but usually only for a short period of time when you’re exploiting the vulnerable and the disturbed. Ultimately people… Actually let me generalize… Ultimately, women (and men smart enough to listen to them) generally figure out what’s going on and despise those who use fear to control.
But that’s the one thing you have to admire about Republicans, they’re willing to use whatever they have to win right now.
And unfortunately for us, all they seem to have right now — especially when it comes to debt limit hostage taking — is shamelessness.
