We’ve all been guilty of a little conspiracy-flirting from time to time, whether by standing on a mountain of strange circumstance involving 9/11, getting carried away with aliens at Roswell, the JFK assassination and beyond. But it takes a serious level of ridiculousness, of callously wretched delusion, to suggest that a President who hasn’t lifted a single finger on gun control has staged two tragic shooting massacres in an attempt to restrict American gun laws.
During a show in Singapore during Megadeth’s “Th1rt3en World Tour” recently, frontman Dave Mustaine laid out, on mic, his thoughts on some of the recent gun violence in America.
“Back in my country, my president,” Mustaine began, before fake-gagging himself with his finger, “is trying to pass a gun ban so he’s staging all of these murders. The ‘Fast and Furious’ thing down at the border. And Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there. And now, the beautiful people at the Sikh temple.”
Mustaine went on to say, “I don’t know where I’m going to live if America keeps going the way it’s going because it looks like it’s turning into Nazi America.”
Deep breath. Nazi America. Remember that line.
Watch the clip of Mustaine speaking below the segment about Obama and guns begins at 2:38.
Let’s ignore the fact that Mustaine endorsed insane fundamentalist Rick Santorum for president a few months back, or that he went on “George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight” to announce his unsubstantiated certainty that Obama “was born somewhere else than America.” That’s all fine and good for a guy who’s clearly veering hard right in the voting booth, having spent a great many days parked in front of Fox News while on the tour bus. But let’s take a closer look at this “Nazi America” that Mustaine so loudly echoes from the wingnut maniacs ranting on TV each day (while Ted Nugent makes wild faces in the background).
America is a nation in which an individual has a great many avenues and means by which to purchase a firearm under deeply lax restrictions – but not just any firearm, either; We’re talking everything from pea-shooters to forest-leveling automatic weapons with astonishing firepower. You don’t need to know how to operate a gun in any capacity, or demonstrate that ability, in order to own and carry a firearm. It is literally an open field of opportunity for anyone looking to pack heat, and gun laws are outrageously thin despite ever-increasing gun violence in this nation, despite the wild-eyed hyperbole on conservative programs about Obama taking all our weapons away.
The 2nd Amendment, which was written centuries ago under hugely different – and exponentially more dangerous – social circumstance, seems purely untouchable, under penalty of ten million poorly-spelled protest signs, “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and raging ‘Merka-lovin paranoids screaming at anyone who’ll listen that they’ll have to pry the guns out of their cold, dead hands. Charlton Heston nods with satisfaction from his perch atop the NRA throne.
The usual paranoid and shortsighted arguments are in plentitude, of course, on why we can’t ever have gun control of any kind. The guy in Aurora who recently opened fire in the Batman theater was dressed from head to toe in SWAT gear, armed to the teeth, wearing a gas mask. You’ve undoubtedly heard the saying “if there’d been someone else there with a gun, it would have been a different story.” That’s all fine and good, until you take into account that Colorado actually allows citizens to carry firearms with a concealed weapons permit. So there was no restriction. There simply wasn’t another asshole crazy enough to start shooting in a dark theater full of people. But let’s not let the details or logic get in the way.
Are our rights under attack in 2012 America? You bet your ass they are, in a vast spectrum of ways – and liberals are bitterly disappointed in Obama’s approach to indefinite detention, civilian surveillance, devotion to war and hypocrisy in assailing state laws (see the medical marijuana crackdowns in California and Colorado), to begin with. We have wildly egregious impositions on our constitutionally mandated rights, particularly our first amendment rights to assembly (just try to keep count of those Occupy arrests) and free speech, and in the past decade especially, our fourth amendment rights to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. A trip to any airport or a Google search on unmanned monitor drones in America will confirm as much. Yet the protest for such tangible, true threats seems to be limited to those horned progressives who “want to destroy America” and those ever-unpopular intellectuals who want to stink up the place with facts, figures and legitimate debate. To assail the astonishing corporatist legislative corruption in our congressional halls is to get in bed with commie faggots and anti-Americans. And you’re not one of those, are you?!
Obama has done absolutely nothing to restrict gun laws. Let’s get that one tiny, minor fact straight before lathering ourselves with bullshit once more. In fact, let’s repeat it just to be sure:
Obama – and his administration – has done absolutely nothing to restrict gun laws.
By fostering idiocy and low-thinking rage based on zero factual merit whatsoever, Mustaine has once again grabbed the Obama-hatred bandwagon with both hands and thrown all his weight behind propelling its trajectory into even more ludicrous and dangerous waters. The climate of anti-intellectualism and avoidance of the myriad of desperately important issues in favor of distracting hyperbole-frenzy nonsense is such that if the unthinkably tragic happened, if our president were to be assassinated, a great many millions of terribly hoodwinked, painfully uninformed people would rejoice at the idea that they’ve been saved from some horrifically oppressive regime aimed at destroying the very fabric of their lives.
They would cheer as if George Washington were setting off their very own 4th of July fireworks show, all the while eating genetically modified food bought from a bare-bottom-cost warehouse known for restricting wages, crushing local small-business commerce and oppressing their work force. They would celebrate his demise, just as they now celebrate their freedoms and protections while smoking cigarettes laced with poison (that kills half a million of them a year) and driving gas-guzzler vehicles reliant on oil from horrifically oppressive nations with sub-medieval human rights standards, all the while accepting a barrel-bottom living wage as corporate earnings skyrocket, and sending their children to schools that are increasingly stripped of standards, programs and qualified educators. They’d celebrate their newly preserved freedoms through “second-amendment solutions” while being strip-searched at the airports, their phones and emails tapped and screened for security, their lives ruined by medical bills should they ever do something as anti-American and freeloader-lazy as getting ill or injured. They would line the streets screaming that much louder about protecting the American Dream by way of sending our brothers and sisters to die in foreign deserts for utterly inexplicable causes, while ignoring all of these things. They would attempt to justify the fact that the United States spends more on our military and defense than the following 23 countries combined, while raging that Obama is doing nothing about unemployment.
They would then focus their sights – or should I say crosshairs? – on the terrible Consumer Protection Agency or the EPA, believing wholeheartedly that looking out for the American public’s rights and protections in the face of a staggering onslaught of corporate and military power is a sign of weakness.
Fear, hyperbole and distractionism lead us like high-fructose-filled cattle into the voting booths. We gleefully vote against our basic rights and principles, waving flags and screaming patriotic slogans, comforted by the power in numbers we’re surrounded by as we head even further down the corridors of complacency and short-sighted consumerism, as wages continue to stagnate and the cost of living continues to rise. As we are faced with the fact that we are the first generation in modern American history to have far less financial stability, far less promise and opportunity for the future than our parents.
This is the God-Blessed America we live in in 2012. Dave Mustaine is a proud mascot of a cancer of treasonous lies that is ravaging a nation that once stood as the greatest hope the world had of preserving true freedom and individualism.
Thankfully, he’s not the only one with a megaphone.
