My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. – Samuel Johnson

Last updated on: October 3, 2017 at 6:40 pm by Mark Shea

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. – Samuel Johnson 2017-10-03T18:40:41-07:00 Mark Shea

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Yesterday, we were instructed “It’s too soon! Don’t politicize this tragedy and insult the dead by trying to prevent the next tragedy that will create more dead” by the people who then instantly took advantage of the silence of decent people to bray, as Bill O’Reilly did, that mass murder is the “price of freedom“.

Unfortunately for that disgraced sex predator, the Onion, not feeling itself bound by the phony speech codes of the Right Wing Noise Machine, was way ahead of him with a headline reading “NRA Says Mass Shootings Just The Unfortunate Price Of Protecting People’s Freedom To Commit Mass Shootings“, demonstrating what an absurd (and now completely predictable) joke the allegedly “prolife” Right Wing Culture of Death has become.

Onion staff writers are not supernaturally gifted prophets who somehow read O’Reilly’s mind. They are simply people who have been to this rodeo multiple times a year for the past 35 years and know the by-now-completely-dog-eared playbook the apologists for gun slaughter read from every single time.

We all know the absurd lies. I tossed out a little request for readers on FB to hit me with them and and they instantly hit “play” on the file of lies, fallacies, denials, excuses, evasions and defenses of the status quo:

Only prayer can change things, not taking weapons away from raging psychopaths. It’s a *heart* issue, not a *gun* issue! (Great! Let’s do nothing to prevent Kim Jong Un and ISIS from acquiring nuclear weapons. Just pray God will change their hearts.)
We need guns to defend ourselves from the state! (That would be the state you demand black guys reverence at football games, right?)
Seriously, the second amendment exists so that citizens can defend themselves from the state! (No. It exists so that “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” can defend itself against rowdies, bandits, Indian attacks, British, and whoever else an 18th century colonist saw as a *threat to the free STATE. George Washington crushed the Whiskey Rebellion when Gun Rights Zealots attacked the state they believed was oppressing them. Lincoln terminated the even bigger experiment in Second Amendment zeal that began in 1861. Since then, the state has acquired far bigger guns and far more skilled people to fire them. If you believe a bunch of portly suburbanites are going to attack the 101st Airborne with success because they resent their cable TV tax rates, you are not living in reality.*)
When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns! (This “all law is futile” argument comes from people who have intensely believed for 35 years that Roe v. Wade is just about to be overturned and that it is definitely a real true thing that we will be able to completely eliminate abortion by force of law. The cognitive dissonance between these two completely irreconcilable beliefs has never been resolved or even confronted, as far as I know.)
Okay, granting that abortion will not be outlawed in the US, gun laws are completely futile. In the real world, criminals don’t obey the law. (It turns out that Australia, the UK, Canada, and numerous other countries are, in fact, part of the Real World and that their gun death rate is massively lower than ours. How? It was achieved by passing laws, not by “thoughts and prayers”. That’s because, while criminals don’t obey laws, gun manufacturers and sellers have to.)
Even in those places, people still get shot. (This variation on “all law is futile”–something only gun advocates preach–basically boils down to the claim that unless a law has a 100% success rate, it is a waste of time, something nobody believes about anything except gun violence.)
The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. (If you think there were no good guys with guns in that crowd in Vegas, you are yet again, not in contact with reality. Lots of people in Vegas are armed. They could not prevent the slaughter. Belief in the Good Guy with a Gun scenario as the solution to our slaughter rate is exactly like believing that bringing more money to Vegas is sure to increase your odds of winning. The absolutely guaranteed outcome, statistically speaking, is that the House always wins in Vegas. The absolutely certain statistical outcome of repeating this Good Guy with a Gun lie in defense of the status quo, verified for decades, is that we will again have 33,000 people dead from gunshot wounds on December 31, 2017. It is as certain as sunrise.)
Chicago has a high gun death rate despite gun laws, therefore all laws are futile. (It turns out there are other places than Chicago and that Chicago’s case is not typical.)
If people don’t use guns, they will just use rocks/knives/hammers. (The hundreds wounded and 59 dead in Vegas would still be alive had the shooter thrown rocks at them. I think this ridiculous slogan–one cannot dignify it as a ‘thought’–is perhaps the most insulting to the intelligence of all these lies.)
Cars kill more people than guns, let outlaw them too! (Nobody’s talking about outlawing guns. We are talking about sane regulations–like for, you know, cars.)
Abortion kills far more than guns. We need to focus on abortion! (…said the “prolife” Christian totally focused on devoting his time and energy to fighting the Church’s call for gun sanity by making every excuse he can think of for maintaining a gun regime that kills 33,000 people every year. Would to God you did devote you time and energy to defending the unborn and not gun dementia. The use of the unborn as human shields for maintaining the status quo on our gun slaughter rate is the single most disgusting tactic of the anti-abortion-but-not-prolife apologist for the Right Wing Culture of Death.)
Jesus gave the charter for second amendment rights when he told Peter “It is enough”: after he brandished two swords at the Last Supper. (Learn to read the Bible and stop being silly.)
This is a government conspiracy like Sandy Hook, designed to make Gun Advocates look bad. (Nope. You are doing a great job of that yourself with your monstrous abuse of grieving parents and traumatized victims and your depraved lies.)
Guns are morally neutral–and the real villain is video games and porn. (Technology–like, y’know, video games and porn–changes us. We respond to our environment. Guns open up vistas of power and violence not available to those who do not have them and provoke thoughts about how to deal with one’s problems that would not have otherwise occurred to us.)

And on and on the lies and fallacies go. They are so threadbare and absurd that somebody actually put this together, just to chronicle the pastische of lies and fallacies spewed by the Gun Cult after every slaughter:

No automatic alt text available.

It was a phenomenon I first noted after Sandy Hook. Till that moment, I simply had not paid attention to the Gun Debate. But after it, of course, I was faced with a horror that shocked the conscience and demanded action. Assuming (foolishly) that any prolife Catholic agreed that here was something demanding we act to prevent, if possible such a horror from ever occurring again, I was instead met with a wall of passive aggressive “prolife” conservative Christian resistance at every turn. And the strangest thing about it was the narcissism of it.

Instead of “Dear God! We must see what we can do to make sure such slaughter is, if not eliminated, at least reduced as much as possible!” the response was and remains, “Don’t blame me! I didn’t do it! Why do you hate me? Who made you my judge? Don’t touch my guns!”

That is super weird to me. To every person who responds this way my reply is the same: I don’t know you and I’m not judging you. This is not about you. Why do you take this personally? I’m trying to find ways to reduce our gun slaughter rate.

Unless, of course, you feel guilty about wanting to maintain the status quo of our gun regime because clutching your gun and lining the pocket of the arms industry is more important to you than lifting a finger to prevent slaughters like Sandy Hook and Vegas (and the other 33,000 we are on track for by year’s end). In which case, I am happy to be a goad to your bad conscience.

But be aware that in that case, it is you who is judging your heart, not me. I don’t know you.

I believe that, confronted with such slaughter, refusal to act is a grave sin of omission, comparable to being an accomplice. And I believe use of Thoughts and Prayers as a substitute for, rather than a spur to, action is both a grave scandal to the Gentiles and a grave danger to soul.

Jesus has particularly sharp words for those who use gooey piety as a shield to cover their dogged refusal to *act*.

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? Every one who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep, and laid the foundation upon rock; and when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house, and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But he who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation; against which the stream broke, and immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.” (Lk 6:46–49).

So what might action look like?

Well, the great part about being Catholic is that the odds are usually extremely high some really smart people have already thought very deeply about whatever it is you are pondering, and it turns out the Church has actually given the whole American Gun Slaughter issue some thought.

So we have a clear choice as Catholics. It’s not (as usual) that we can’t do anything. It’s that we have to want to. We can choose to keep telling this lie:

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

…and thereby passive-aggressively fight the Church and this guy

“These weapons manufacturers … manufacture death, they are merchants of death and they make death into a piece of merchandise.” – Pope Francis

…not to mention God.

Or we can simply stop fighting the Church, take what small step we can (such as not barfing up and recirculating the lies chronicled above). We can stop and ask ourselves “Is this thing I am about to post calculated to make sure the status quo is maintained–thereby making me an accomplice to the 33,000 deaths that will absolutely have occurred by year’s end if nothing changes? Or is there some small step I can take, in union with Holy Church, to say “Enough!” to our gun slaughter regime?

No. You cannot change the world overnight. But for the love of God, you must leave it the same either. Listen to Holy Church. Be more prolife, not less. Begin by clearing your mind of cant–and can’t.

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