Joe The Plumber: 'Your Dead Kids Don't Trump My Constitutional Rights' To Have Guns

[moonbladem]

Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, insisted the deaths of innocent people "don't trump" his constitutional rights in an open letter to the families of victims in Friday's shooting rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Wurzelbacher's letter was published on Barbwire Monday, days after one shooting victim's

Comments

[deadsong]

I'm with you. Last Thursday night I heard a 14-year-old boy die less than 300 feet from my front stoop. I didn't know it at the time. I heard six gunshots go off and tried to just...ignore it, because it's not that uncommon around my neighborhood for people to pop off at nothing to try to be badass, plus a lot of times illegal fireworks sound like gunshots, and if I panicked every time I'd never leave the apartment; it's usually nothing to worry about unless you hear shouting or sirens, and calling the cops is pointless because they won't come just for "I heard gunshots but didn't see anything." I only found out later when the mayor was talking about it that this kid--barely a teenager--died with three bullets in him, in a spot I walk over every day on my way to get the mail or run to the corner store or head to the laundromat. 14, and someone felt he needed to die enough to put not one, but three bullets in him. And the entire neighborhood is so desensitized that they're just retreating behind closed doors and hoping the next time it happens it's not them, instead of reaching out to support the family or speak out against the people who did this. And it's not the first time someone's been shot on my block during the year I've lived in this neighborhood--and this is a family neighborhood. Almost all my neighbors in my building are working parents with kids that they love more than anything, or old people just trying to live quietly.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, about how fucked up it is that we live in a world where a small few with guns can terrorize a disproportionately larger population into living in fear and shaping their every daily action over when it is or isn't safe to be outside where there may or may not be gun nuts. I've personally had a gun shoved in my face in broad daylight--though this was years ago and in a different city--and the effects of that still linger with me and affect my awareness of my surroundings when I'm out of the safe space of my apartment. And things like this are happening all around. Everywhere. It's not just the highly-publicized mass shootings; it's the gang violence and the spousal violence and the racially motivated "accidents" and even the real accidents. And then assholes like this have to go mouth off about how important it is that they keep their guns, little realizing they're no better than the people who've brought such misery on others because they're drunk on the power of the gun in their hands.

~deep breath~ I meant this to be a short comment just agreeing with you, and I went off a bit. I'm sorry. This has been eating at me and god, if there was any way to just...disappear every last ballistic or explosive weapon from this earth...I'd take it, and suffer whatever consequences were heaped on me with pleasure.

Edited to fix a punctuation!fail and for clarity.

[tabaqui]

No, no sorries. What you say is 100 percent right. It's sickening that a relative few in our millions of citizens can and are allowed to terrorize us all to the point where *anyone* with a gun is a threat. I wouldn't stay in a business if some random Joe walked in with a gun on his hip, and I would never return if it were allowed, but that would really on inconvenience *me*, not the gun-toting wannabe who thinks he needs to be ARMED AT ALL TIMES OMG!!!

I am so sick of the caterwauling from the gun fetishists that insist that we're only safe if we're festooned with weapons, and that their right to own as many penis-extenders as possible is more important than the right of citizens to be fucking *safe*.

We've sold our collective souls, over the years, to the military-industrial complex and this is, pretty much, the 'natural' outgrowth of that. Fear creates profit.

And, lest I forget the *most important thing* - how absolutely horrifying and awful for this poor boy and for his family.

[ladycyndra]

Also agreed with you 100%.

[rhysande]

I feel less safe because of all the gun nuts and their desire to cart their prosthetic manhood around with them whenever they're out in public, not more safe. It's turning everyone into Schrodinger's Murderer.

[tabaqui]

EXACTLY.
It's like - so somebody decides to use a gun for some reason. And the gun nuts start shooting to 'stop him' - they don't know who they're shooting at or why, they *aren't* all sharpshooters, they're surrounded by panicked civilians, and *children*, and the cops are arriving *also* not knowing who is the 'bad guy' and who isn't.... When Senator Giffords was shot, people were running to help with weapons drawn and a couple people almost shot other people who were trying to *help* the woman and contain the shooter.

Magnify that by the utter chaos in a mall, a park, a *dark movie theatre* with a movie playing and yeah - i'm not feeling safer, i'm feeling like a duck in a shooting gallery.

[moonshaz]

I agree with you absolutely, completely and totally.

Also: lmao @ "penis-extenders"! Because it's SO fucking true.

[deadsong]

You hit it right on. The presence of a gun in anyone's hands--even the cops--escalates tension and perception of danger immediately, because you cannot know the intentions of the person with the gun even if they're wearing a damned badge. You cannot know what action you might take that will make that person perceive you as a threat. The pervasive fear might even cause you to behave differently, aka suspiciously, making you a target for this person who's jumped-up on the power they can wield with their shiny bullet-popping fuckstick.

And I wouldn't want to be in that environment. I would remove myself from it and never go back.

The problem is, I don't have that option. Because that environment is the world we live in today, at this point. And all these people who want to walk around with a gun at their hip for safety and liberty and freedom (stop quoting Benjamin Franklin, you asshats, THIS WAS NOT WHAT HE MEANT, you do not get to deny other people their sense of safety or freedom to exercise your own)--let me start that sentence over before that long parenthetical aside. All these people who want to walk around with a gun on their hip for safety and liberty and freedom don't even seem to realize that they are perpetuating a culture of fear, because what does it matter as long as they feel like the big man with the fat ballsack?

On the matter of fear and profit--I'm sure the for-profit prison system can be lumped into that, too. As long as we have guns on the streets, we have criminals filling those cells and lining someone's pockets. Who cares if they have to kill or hurt someone to get there, eh?

[tabaqui]

Yup, all of this. And yes - I can't really remove myself from the environment, either, other than selective shops or whatever, because getting a conceal-carry in Missouri is sickeningly easy.

[ladycyndra]

Agreed with you all the way.