On guns

Two months ago today, on December 4, 2024, Luigi Mangioni gunned down health insurance CEO Brian Thompson in the street in New York City. This was notable because the victim was so rich and high-profile, and because everyone in the country is so angry at health insurance companies that they were not very angry at the shooter. The thought was, well, he probably signed off on killing several hundred grandmas right before he left for that conference, so honestly fuck that insurance guy.

Not to mention, only one guy got shot, so it doesn't really count as a "mass shooting." Per Wikipedia, you need at least 4 people to be shot to get on that list.

12 days after that on December 16, a high school student in a private Christian school in my city killed a teacher, a student, and herself and injured at least 7 others. This was notable to me because it was in my city, and notable to everyone because the shooter was a girl, who it turns out was being manipulated by a guy from some other state. Most shooters are male, because men and boys have more access to guns as a rule, and because they are more socialized to be angry instead of scared or sad or any other negative emotion, so the girl's gender and the manipulation made it a little bit interesting. Also school shootings always get a little more attention than regular every day shootings.

In between those two shootings were 13 incidents that made the list of mass shootings. 13 shootings. In 12 days.

And the only one we currently remember is the health care guy, and honestly no one's really still talking about that. We've all been distracted by politics.

Hell, when I logged in here it was to write about politics. Politics is bullshit, Trump's in office, we're all going to die, don't comply in advance, you don't have to be courteous to people who wish you dead, it might be a sprint, a marathon, the rest of our lives but we know we have to do something. Yadda yadda, etc., so on and so forth.

Bullshit.

Gun violence is also bullshit, but we aren't going to be doing anything about that anytime soon. Because there's politics.

If you're keeping score, we're losing, but you wouldn't know that from listening to the press. The press doesn't write articles when a single poor person dies of violence or when a middle-class person dies of illness. When a rich person or a famous person dies it's news. If a poor person kills a rich person with a gun, it's a crisis.

Right now the death score is definitely citizens 1, health care CEOs millions, but we didn't start talking about all those millions until the guy in charge of the machine that killed them was murdered, because they didn't get killed by guns. When you kill people by denying them health care, that's not violence, that's capitalism baybee.

When most people, normal people, people like you or me or a random guy on the street get killed by guns, that's violence but only in the "Oh, crumbs, we should stop violence - if only people could start being nicer to each other!" way. Not the ways that would actually help anything, which is to stop people from having guns or help them to have better prospects in life than shooting someone. That would cost money, and so it would interfere with capitalism, baybee.

Guns are also very popular with Republicans right now, and billionaires (the winners of capitalism) are also very popular with Republicans, and billionaires have a lot of money and like to be popular, so guns are pretty OK, still. Except when someone once in a while uses one to kill a CEO. Because CEOs are usually multi-millionaires (the second-place finishers of capitalism), and if people are allowed to just kill the winners, that makes it hard to play the capitalism game. Baybee.

In the capitalism game, only the losers are supposed to die.

In the United States, according (again) to Wikipedia, there are more guns in civilian possession than there are people. We're also the only country with a population over 10 million that has this level of firearms deaths, and we kill ourselves with guns more than anyone else except Greenland.

But the crisis is ongoing, and perpetual, and therefore boring. We see endless articles about how we're killing each other and ourselves with guns, but we don't read them and they don't get picked up by national news because that's not news, it's boring. We see endless articles about the way we're being slowly ground to death by a for-profit health insurance system, but we don't read them because that's not news, it's boring. And newspapers and big news aggregators don't want to print those articles because clicks are cash, and boring doesn't sell, and news is for-profit. Just like the health insurance system. And selling things successfully is capitalism, baybee, and the way you win and become a multi-millionaire or a billionaire is to not be boring.

And since that's true, and I don't have any answers about this that don't revolve around politics, just endless, boring, depressing truths about how much no one cares if the little people like you and me and every goddamn hourly worker in the country die as long as they can make robots pump the gas, then I will close this out by saying someday, when this all falls apart like it's been fixing to do since 50 or 35 or 20 years before I was born, maybe we should think a little harder about whether we want everyone and their baby and a good portion of the pets to have their own personal gun and their own personal health insurance and their own personal undervalued life.

Except for the billionaires. The ones who won capitalism.

Baybee.