I’ve done a pretty good job of eliminating lines of “conservative thought” from my Facebook friends list. The biggest reason is that I like to use Facebook to see what my friends are up to, how their families are, and what they might be doing to make the world a better place. And sure, I too have thoughts political. And I even share them on Facebook, but with this caveat, will what I’m sharing make the world a better place?
But occasionally one or two slip through my anti-anxiety net and more often than not I’m just like . Lately, the “conservative thoughts” that have been making their way through most often have to do with gun control. Someone who likes to hunt, or enjoys their weapons, reposts something with an eagle and a flag and probably an assault rifle on it from “You’ll never disarm me” or “Can the Declaration of Independence get more FANS than Obama?” and I more often than not just de-friend them. Discernment is one of the ways we can weed out suffering in our lives and frankly, I just don’t have enough of the paramita of patience to suffer fools.
Today sweet one poked its little head through my net. And because of the great irony this little picture represents, I decided to write a blog post about it because responding to the re-poster would just lead to more suffering.
So, if you, as I do, disagree with the sentiment this photo intends to impart I’m going to ask you to bear with me. And if you, on the other hand, completely agree with the sentiment contained therein I’m going to ask you to read it, start to finish, a second time.
The image was originally posted by a “conservative” wordpress blog http://seano.org/ and later picked up by “Can the Declaration of Independence get more FANS than Obama?” on Facebook. Later it was posted through to my feed by a soon-to-be ex-friend (sorry buddy, I’ve been giving you the benefit of my patience for far too long) where I encountered it and nearly choked laughing.
So, let’s not even get into the idea that these numbers are most likely largely made up. I mean who is keeping track of annual statistics for death by hammer? Is there really an epidemic of sue chefs killing kitchen staff with knives in America? If so that’s something I’d truly love to see get some news coverage. But quality of the numbers aside, many of the things cited above as being responsible for death are in fact controlled much more strictly than assault weapons. For instance, name a county in this country that doesn’t have multiple officers of the law out looking for drunk drivers during the weekend. Getting a driver’s license in this country is considerably more difficult than getting a firearm. And we shouldn’t need to go into how difficult it is to become a doctor let alone keep your license to practice in North America.
Yes, I do have the heart of a liberal and personally I’m really looking forward to Obamacare taking on force of law. And no, even being a gun owner, I don’t agree that enough has been done to ensure safe ownership. My opinions aside, why would you point out a number of highly regulated items to make a case for lax regulation and no control of the item you want to keep? I mean, and I don’t want seano to think I’m calling him stupid or anything, this just doesn’t show a very deep consideration of the facts at hand.
Its opinions like this that make me wish I was still hard at work back in high school debating. And there’s a point that just emerged all on its own, maybe we wouldn’t have to worry so much about gun control if more kids joined their high school debate teams. And even if we did have to worry an equal amount about wing bats getting ahold of assault weapons at least we’d be less likely to have to endure the constant stream of poorly formed justifications post fact violence from people worried that their gun case won’t be chocked full when the zombies come.
Jesus!
FeetForBrains 