Calling Out Gun-Worshipping Fanatics for What They Are

The opening scene of Alien Sensation, fifth novel of the Other Worldly series coming later this month, involves a threat to protagonist Rowan Layne’s life by a gun-toting supposed “religious” fanatic who doesn’t like her speaking truth, or really speaking at all. Because he’s also a misogynist straight out of the Salem witch trial mentality.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tackled violence involving guns and heinous hypocrites in this series, because those fictional characters on a Humans First! anti-alien tyrannical tirade are my way of addressing issues of racism, sexism, and religious hypocrisy so very rampant in real life here in the US.

And it’s not as if I’ll run out of things to write about on the subject, given the hubris of Republicans who worship guns, exalting weapons designed to kill their fellow humans above human and all other life itself. How many mass shootings have we had from homegrown terrorists in the past month? Or last week?

The problem is, I’m sick of writing about it in this blog, which I started a mere 15 months ago. One headline in particular from March of 2021 jumps out at me: “Plague of Gun Mongering Psychopaths: A Never-Ending Black Hole of Maniacal Murder.”

It’s also a subject I repeatedly tackled in my newspaper column in 2018-2019 while I was living (barely) in a place called Yerington in Lyon County, Nevada. A rural hamlet where they held an annual NRA fundraiser at the local Boys and Girls Club facility on Main Street and raffled off a rifle to the highest bidder.

A town where the annual Boys and Girls Club fundraiser, a country music festival called Night in the Country, featured ubiquitous Confederate flags hoisted by drunken racists.

A county seat where the annual Lyon County Fair also featured a Confederate flag proudly flown at the same height and size as the American flag by a group of Civil War “reenactors” who used live ammunition in their demonstrations. Despite the inconvenient reality that Nevada was not part of the Civil War.

I could go on. While living there, one might suppose it was dangerous for me to do so. I look back at column headlines such as, “We need more understanding,” addressing the need to listen to victims traumatized by gun violence, specifically students in the wake of the Parkland, Florida high school massacre. But most folks in Lyon County only listened with favorable interest to rants about how they can shoot anyone who “comes on their property.”

Then there was my piece titled, “Is the Second Amendment an obsolete relic?” And the one addressing the NRA attempting to bully me and others who didn’t think it was such a stellar idea for the Boys and Girls Club to host gun mongering fundraisers, especially in the wake of school shootings. That one was titled, “Let snowflakes descend on NRA political thuggery.”

I addressed the insidious nature of the NRA and its moronic members more than once. “Russia, Republican Party and NRA spell collusion” was my August 1, 2018, column. The issues I wrote about turned out to be true. Kind of like my April 2018 column titled, “Homicidal women haters are homegrown.”

Then there were the local and state politicians who embraced what they deemed a “God-given” right to run rampant with guns. Adam Laxalt as the Nevada attorney general crowed this on Facebook, despite the fact that he’s a lawyer, not a preacher. He’s now running for the US Senate because apparently not even the rule of law can keep a bullying, gun-loving guy down.

While addressing actual law instead of the NRA or Laxalt version, I wrote columns such as “Deadly force to defend property not lawful,” “Justifying violence to protect unjust way of life,” “Patriots stand in front of a gun, not behind gun rights,” “Assault weapons are not for self-defense,” and “Why no outrage for victims of American killers?”

After Lyon County declared itself a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” in March 2019, I wrote a piece titled, “Lyon County needs sanctuary from stupidity.” This after attending a county commissioner’s meeting in which all five white Republican commissioners (only one female) anointed themselves arbiters to determine what gun laws in our nation they deemed unconstitutional, because they are and were incapable—gleefully so—of grasping that this is not their job. But they still thought it their right to direct the county sheriff not to comply with laws they didn’t personally agree with. Which might not have been a problem if the sheriff wasn’t tickled pink about it.

At this official public meeting, the county sheriff proudly stood before a microphone and announced how glad he was that there were so many who wanted to exercise their Second Amendment rights in Lyon County. In my column, I noted that the sheriff “should be less concerned about violating someone’s Second Amendment rights, which is not his job, and more cognizant of not violating the Fourth Amendment, which is…And if protecting individual gun rights is so important to the sheriff, having his deputies respond to 911 calls by repeatedly shouting in agitation if anyone in a home has guns is not consistent with that stance.”

The absurdity of police who promote Second Amendment rights above all others is still lost on members of law enforcement, who are so terrified of those toting guns that they put victims at risk when they show up with nerves already at hair-trigger breaking point to address a situation that requires level-headed calm, not fear-induced reactionary mayhem. Oh, and actual compassion for victims and their families might be nice too but is apparently not part of their twisted version of the Second Amendment, hence actual human beings who aren’t gunslinging monsters don’t matter.

In April 2021, I wrote a blog post herein, “Unreasonable Search and Seizure or Outright Murder,” about the Fourth Amendment and police failure to actually follow it. Because it’s part of the Bill of Rights too. But if you listen to the cretins in Lyon County, the NRA, MAGA morons, and/or Fox News, you’d think the Second Amendment was the entirety of the Constitution. Then again, many of those folks don’t read. Anything.

Also in April 2021, I blogged about, “To Bear or Not to Bare Your Arms,” a sort of tongue-in-cheek take on misinterpretations of the Second Amendment, which doesn’t mean what the NRA or Lyon County commissioners say it does.

No point, really, in reiterating salient points from cases like DC v. Heller yet again. Because clearly no one is listening. Least of all public officials and pathetic people who are so terrified of their shadows that they stockpile guns and think it’s their Second Amendment right to shoot whomever they please.

As I said on Twitter recently: It’s not Republicans’ cold, dead hands we need to pry guns from. It’s their cold, dead hearts and minds.

Back in 2016, someone I knew private-messaged me on Facebook about how we need to “stand together as Christians” to elect the monster who is now thankfully the former president. I wanted to tell her that she misspelled racist, selfish, violent hypocrite. I didn’t, because I no longer engage with ignorant traitors to democracy and to all humanity.

It’s also why I no longer live in Lyon County, Nevada. But this is happening all over our nation, especially in rural areas.

Is anyone paying attention? Because these hateful, religious hypocrites are out of control and frothing at the mouth to pull the trigger on anyone who doesn’t look like them or believe the utter crap that they lap up like rabid animals. And heaven forbid a woman ever tell them no.