Paranoia Blues

While out and about running errands the other day, I found myself stuck in traffic behind some damn oversize pick up sporting this bumper sticker.

Stand and Fight? What the fuck does that even mean here in US of A in 2015? Despite all the hysteria and agitato from the “right,” the crime rate’s way down. Who do these gun toting, fear mongering, always-up-for-a-fight bozos think they need to stand up and fight against?

The government mebbe? Oh please. Let’s not go all Jade Helm here, bitte sehr. Obama is not out to take away your penis/courage substitute OR put his opponents in FEMA camps.

Really—honest and true!

Paranoia
noun para·noia \ˌpar-ə-ˈnȯi-ə\
1: a psychosis characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur usually without hallucinations
2: a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others

So what’s this stand and fight horseshit all about? Gun sales. Fear of our fellow man driven to the point of derangement and more gun sales. The NRA, in its role as chief sales weasel for firearms manufacturers, doesn’t just sow the seeds of angst, of major paranoia, it waters and fertilizes it with a metric ton of rat feces. Instilling madness, this is the marketing strategy of the gun industry.

The NRA masquerades as the voice of American gun owners but it's no more than the paid (exceedingly well paid) mouthpiece and spokesmodel for Smith & Wesson, Beretta USA, SIGARMS, and Sturm, Ruger & Co. plus 18 other death merchants 

They weren’t always like this. They've devolved. It began 35-40 years ago.

TBogg, one of my fav bloggers, wrote of his childhood  when hunting was done, in no small part, to put food on the table. He learned gun safety from NRA safety courses. In his post I was the NRA, he goes on to say:

I used to hunt and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the hell out of it. But I wouldn’t consider attempting it now, in an age where gun-owners lump AR-15’s in with sporting guns. Where a lousy shooter can disguise his inability to shoot with an extended clip that allows him to keep shooting until he finally hits something, anything. Where hunters feel the need for silencers for God knows what reason.

The NRA has killed off the sportsman with their neglect and replaced him with the gun nut who spends more money on more guns, not out of a desire to feed his family, but to stave off a mythical jack-booted government bogeyman coming to take away those guns.

An argument that would ordinarily have only resulted in a screaming match or a fistfight becomes a fatal shooting because one of the participants is legally carrying a concealed firearm.

 Go read the whole column. It’s beautiful (this from a woman who abhors the killing of animals!)—sad but beautiful.

The folks who own the license on paranoia are now telling me that I’m the paranoid one. Huh.

If you don’t like the idea of walking down the street surrounded by armed civilians who could pull a concealed firearm out from under their coat at any moment, that makes you “paranoid,” according to a commentary posted by the National Rifle Association on Wednesday.

As Jim Wright so aptly put it:

Paranoia is a mental illness, not a super power.

Don't be a rube, a mark, a patsy—resist the repulsive, destructive, vile, fear-mongering manipulation.
Paranoia Blues—Paul Simon