Shut Up And Listen 85

Be Afraid Of Everything All The Time
When you saw coverage of that whole sniper thing, did you all of a sudden become more afraid that something similar could happen to you? I’ll bet you did. And the truth is it could. But you could also die of thousands of other things every single day. A car could hit you; a tree could fall on you; lightning could strike you; waste expelled from a plane could fall on your head; a dog could bite you; your husband or wife could shoot you in the face; the mall you’re shopping in could explode because somebody wants revenge against that guy who runs the bookstore; your heart could stop; someone could throw a Molotov cocktail through your window for no reason; your house could burn down because one of your fifty thousand appliances had a power surge and caught fire; an embolism in your head could pop; you could die of cancer that you didn’t know you have; the bus you’re riding could tip over by taking a corner too fast while being too full; the ventilation system at your work could malfunction and carbon monoxide could be pumped in; your daily newspaper could cut you and you could bleed to death when you find out that your blood won’t clot; a small, jagged piece of metal in a hamburger from some fast food place could rip open your stomach and the acid could dissolve your vital organs; an asteroid could smash into the Earth; a bird could fly into your mouth and get stuck while you have a cold so you suffocate; that old roof your house has could collapse when it rains; an icicle could fall off your gutters and smash through your skull; you could trip and fall out a window; the elevator could break and fall down thirty stories; the fire hydrant’s cap could break and then the water shot out could break your neck; terrorists could just randomly kill you; Viagra could cause a lack of blood from your brain so it doesn’t have enough for you to live; your cat could piss in your mouth while you’re in a drug-induced sleep and you could suffocate; the US government could bomb you; you could fall into an open manhole and hit your head; you could bang your head while leaning back in your chair; your car engine could just blow up; someone could light a match at the gas station; a random person could kill you with their bare hands for no reason; food poisoning; water poisoning; pollution; you could fall out of bed and break your neck; you could be killed by some nut who decides to take a few out with him before he commits suicide; and those are just the ideas that I can think of right now off the top of my head.
	Think about that the next time you get all freaked out by one or two random occurrences on TV, okay? If you allow fear to run your life, you might as well just kill yourself now, because even lying in bed is dangerous. I’m not trying to freak people out by saying this (and yes, there are people who would be freaked out by this thought), I’m just trying to point out that some guy shooting people near Washington isn’t a reason to be afraid. He killed a small number of people. A very small number of people in the larger sense. More people died in car accidents each day than people killed by the sniper. More people died of cancer and AIDS and all sorts of other diseases.
	More people were killed by people they knew and loved.
	Instead of being afraid of the world, focus on making it a place that shouldn’t be feared. Your gun makes you feel safe, doesn’t it? But does it actually make anyone safer? The large majority of people shot are by their own gun, or a loved one’s gun.
	So how exactly does that gun protect you and your family again?
	There’s no gun in my house and I am safe. I’ve never been robbed, I’ve never been shot, I’ve never had a gun pulled on me, and the King of the British Empire has never come in and started pushing me around. If I can survive without a gun, why can’t you?
	But then again, I’m Canadian and not an American, so I just don’t understand the American Need for a gun. It’s in the constitution, dammit, and that means that George Washington liked guns and who the fuck are we to argue with George Washington?
	Let’s listen to the NRA and believe that a gun isn’t a weapon, it’s a tool. Ignore the fact that the primary use of a gun is to put bullets in things. And do you know what “things” are most often shot? 
	People.
	A gun is a weapon. That’s its predominant use. A saw is a tool. Its predominant use is to cut wood, not cut people up. It can be used as such, but ninety-nine percent of the time it isn’t. A knife is a tool. Its predominant use is to cut up food, not cut people up. It can be used as such, but again, ninety-nine percent of the time it isn’t. A gun has all sorts of other uses than killing people, like killing animals, wounding people and animals, threatening people and animals, and practising shooting so your skill level of killing, wounding, and threatening people and animals is at its peak performance.
	Worthy tool objectives, I believe.
	I’ve rambled on for too long (and totally got off-track, too), so I guess I should wrap it up, yeah? The point of this column is to show you the true dangers in your society. It isn’t nuts running around, sniping people from two hundred feet away, it’s you and these fucked up notions you have about what are essential rights. The second amendment should worry you more than anything else. For what it represents, for the fact that no one seems to want to remember its context, for the fact that people worship the fucking thing as if it’s divine law. It’s not. It was written by militants who just violently broke free from an oppressive empire, which isn’t quite the America of today, is it? No, it isn’t, so why does it think the exact same way still? Still acting like the baby it was then. Always wanting the big toys and to not share them. 
	The only thing I’m afraid of these days is what will happen tomorrow in US because of the way it is these days.