If This Were A Show, It Might Be Funny

Would you rather lose all of your old memories, or never be able to make new ones?

When I look at pictures of how skinny I was before college

whatshouldwecallme:

On why I hate the people of NYS for griping about the new gun control laws

I know this is going to be political, long-winded, and boring, but I need to put it down somewhere to keep myself from exploding in a fit of rage.

This week marked the passing of newer, stricter gun laws in New York state. I don’t really feel like going of the details of all of them, but you can just google it yourself if you’re curious or whatever.

You see, I live in upstate NY just outside the city of Albany (the state capital if you didn’t know). But drive about 15 minutes in any direction from the city, and you can be in the middle of fucking nowhere. Real backwoods shit. Long story short, there are a lot of people up here that like their guns. It took all of about 5 minutes after the passing of these new gun laws for an embarrassing number of my facebook “friends” to take to the internet to voice their displeasure. The rumblings included, but were not limited to:

• comparing the banning of assault/military weapons in NY to Hitler, Mao, and Stalin banning private gun ownership in their respective dictatorships.
• Actual quote: “There goes New York giving new meaning the the words “Empire State.”
• various asinine uses of the second amendment

The overwhelming sentiment among people that are mad about these new laws seems to boil down to this: “99% of gun owners are responsible with their weapons and don’t use them to shoot people. You are punishing responsible, safe gun owners by passing these laws. Crazy people will still find ways to get guns. You’re only making it harder for law abiding citizens to be able to protect themselves.”

To that, my response is, what about 9/11?  September 11th, in an instant, changed everything about the way we fly. One horrible event in our nation’s history pointed out a weakness. A way people could hurt our citizens. Ruin lives. Make us afraid. Yes. We all grumbled and felt (and still feel) inconvenienced when airports started imposing new restrictions on what we could and couldn’t fly with. We begrudgingly put our 3oz containers of shampoo into clear ziploc bags, chugged our bottles of water before going through security, stripped off our shoes and walked through machines that let people essentially see us naked.

Why do we do it? Because we’d rather deal with all that shit than let one crazy person get onto a plane with a bomb. Millions of people take to the air every year with no intention of ever trying to hijack or blow up a plane. We safe flyers accept the inconveniences of going through airport security because it lets us know that they did everything they could to keep us safe.

That is pretty much how I feel about gun control. Yes. 99% of gun owners ARE responsible and will never try to kill an innocent human being, but how many of these tragic mass shootings need to occur before we realize we need to change something? If the passing of these new laws stops even one person who was planning a mass shooting from obtaining a weapon, then I will have considered them a success. Sure, they’re probably inconvenient for those responsible people, but you know what? You’re probably never going to hunt deer with a fucking automatic assault rife, just like I’m never going to bring a bomb to the airport. Help make us all safer and just put your fucking gun in a metaphorical ziploc baggie.