Jim Wright

Jim Wright

 

@Richard Ruth asked in the previous post:

"So, Jim, what do you think is the catalyst for such obsessive 'protection' of firearms? Why do you think people freak out so viscerally?"

You're looking for a simple answer, there isn't one.

Increasingly America is a toxic combination of fear, ignorance, deliberate stupidity (note the word "deliberate") and sullen anti-intellectualism, confirmation bias, unrelenting media campaigns of hate and xenophobia designed specifically to shape public opinion, widespread extremist apocalyptic religions who declare greed and intolerance and selfishness the path to salvation, and more than anything a pervasive habit of endless pessimism.

For these people, the glass is ALWAYS half empty, the world is ALWAYS going to hell, disaster is ALWAYS just around the corner.

Over the last few decades, and especially since 911, we have become a nation of cutters. We hack at our own flesh with mean abandon and we revel in our imagined misery, moaning endlessly about a "war" on whatever it is we hold most important today.

Hope, dreams, optimism, idealism, daring, confident assurance, positivity, QUIET courage, these are outdated ideas, worthy only of contempt, shouted down in almost any forum of Americans who would rather wallow in imagined misery instead of rising to the challenge.

No matter how much they have, it's never enough. We have to have more. More. More. We have to have bigger cars and bigger houses, bigger guns, bigger military, bigger flags, bigger food. You see it everywhere, supersize me.

No matter how much they have it's never enough. It's never enough because they measure satisfaction in comparison to others. That is to say they have been conditioned from birth by a culture of selfishness to believe freedom and liberty and happiness are finite, there's only so much to go around, and if others get more they are firmly convinced they get less. And they can't stand that idea.

When others gain rights, these people literally, LITERALLY, see that as theft.

This is the very crux of our current division, it drives everything from immigration reform to marriage. This is the reason Congress is deadlocked. This is the mindset of the "your gay marriage ruins my traditional marriage" argument. That mindset ONLY makes sense if you believe you can't be happy if others are happy. You can't be free if others are free. And this is the cornerstone, the very cornerstone, of their religion: Heaven isn't Heaven if everybody gets to go. Heaven is ONLY Heaven if only the people just like me get to go and everybody else burns forever in eternal torment. And that's EXACTLY how they see America. Exactly.

Ultimately, it comes down to fear.

Fundamentally there are two types of people, those who see the unknown future as grand adventure and those who see it as a terrifying abyss. The later type clutch their guns to their chests and peer into the darkness with fear and suspicion. For them a gun is power, security, strength against the darkness. Any perceived threat is an assault on their very manhood, their very concept of themselves. This is why reason and logic will not work, because their fears are rooted in the illogical and primitive part of their minds.

You can not reason with them, they are not reasonable people.

They see the future coming and it scares the hell out of them.