The Ballot Is Mightier Than The AR-15
Our only recourse is to rise up as a culture and make sure these anti-democratic killmongers lose and lose big.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – Another mass shooting in America has come and gone with zero political will to augment gun control laws, especially regarding the mass-shooter’s weapon of choice: the AR-15. According to Gallup, 56 percent of us are very or somewhat dissatisfied with our gun laws, while 52 percent say gun laws should be more strict. A Morning Consult poll from a year ago reported: “84 percent of voters, including 77 percent of Republicans, support requiring all gun purchasers to go through a background check.”
Even with legislation that’d make it more difficult to buy military-style rifles and handguns, we’d still face an almost unregulatable culture here that, among other things, has taught generations of adults that the only way to seek out changes in our society is to shoot at them.
Along those lines, I occasionally like to present a series of campaign videos I’ve collected over the years in which American politicians do literally that – they shoot the things they don’t like. No wonder a significant group of lizard-brained gun fetishists believe gun violence is their only recourse against their perceived political enemies. Don’t blame video games, don’t blame Hollywood, blame the following series of reckless chaos agents for legitimizing political action at the point of a gun.
1) Here’s Republican Will Brooke shooting the Affordable Care Act back in 2014:
2) Senator Rand Paul using an AR-15 to shoot the tax code:
3) Missouri Republican Eric Greitens shooting the “Democrat (sic) machine” and more:
4) Montana Republican Rob Quist shooting his opponent’s campaign ad:
5) Republican Jim Lamon shooting the Democratic Party leadership:
6) Majorie Taylor Greene shooting socialism:
7) Nevada Republican Michele Fiore shooting critical race theory, vaccine mandates, and more:
Contrary to the violence these Republicans trivialize in their videos, Democracy isn’t about shooting things. It’s not about seeking change through civil war or mass shootings. Obviously. Democracy is a battle of words and votes, and the party that gets to lead ought to be the party that uses its words to win the maximum number of votes. Too many Americans, however, see eliminationist crapola in campaign ads from wise old men and women and believe this is how it’s done.
There are other root causes for the Buffalo massacre, but the common thread with the vast majority of these kinds of domestic terror attacks is a pathological cynicism that says the only solution is to shoot and kill. Republican leaders, whether they intend it or not, are normalizing such reactionary awfulness. Until further campaign ethics laws are passed, our only other recourse is to rise up as a culture and make sure these anti-democratic killmongers lose and lose big – show them that the ballot is mightier than the AR-15.
Read an excerpt from the latest for Banter Members:
The Buffalo Shooter Was Not A "Lone Wolf". He Is Exactly What Republicans Wanted
The massacre in upstate New York is just part of the horror the right wants to unleash on this country. It’s nice that some of the press have started to notice.
by Justin Rosario
Writing for an independent media outlet means I am free from the constraints of mainstream media outlets. I do not have to pretend the Republican Party is anything other than a festering cesspool of white nationalism poisoning the entire planet. It also means I constantly live with the frustration of watching professional journalists realize things about the right that people on the left were screaming about years ago.
Today’s rage-induced migraine comes courtesy of Vox who has just now rediscovered “Accelerationism.” The theory motivates a good deal of white nationalist thought and was the impetus behind Saturday’s racially motivated shooting in Buffalo. It is also behind a lot of what the Republican Party is doing. But, just like Bruno, we don't talk about that. We should. We really, really should.
Accelerationism 101 (again)
I wrote about Accelerationism in 2020. It gave a name to something I had been aware of for quite some time as an organizing principle of the right: The desire to collapse society and, hopefully, trigger a race war in the process. This has long been a dream of white nationalists. Accordingly, their bible has long been The Turner Diaries, something else that I’ve been jumping up and down about for years.
The Turner Diaries is (technically) a science fiction novel in which white men in America, stop me if this sounds familiar, are the victims of an evil and corrupt society. All of their guns have been taken away by a federal government controlled by Jews, the supervillain of every white nationalist fairy tale. Any non-white person can beat up white men and it is a “hate crime” for white men to fight back. This book, it should be noted, was written in 1978, almost 20 years before Fox News was created to sell this exact narrative to millions of Americans. Tucker Carlson repeats it almost verbatim every night…
This is an excerpt. To continue reading this, go here.
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