The Electron Pencil

Our Daily Double: God & Guns

Isn’t it fascinating how god is being brought into the gun equation these days? More and more we see the 2nd Amendment fetishists claiming our right to carry any and every possible firearm comes directly from the Big Daddy-o in the Sky himself.

They even have a biblical line they’re referring to now. Something about how god rules over us with an iron rod and how we, then, should protect ourselves similarly.

Epiphany: After all these millennia of humankind wondering and seeking and speculating, I at last have discovered the true definition of god. He — of course, he — is the ultimate argument closer.

I mean, we can go on and on and drive ourselves in circles about what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote out this holy land’s charter, specifically what they really intended when they crafted the absurdly — probably intentionally — nebulous 2nd Amendment. Open-ended arguments are frustrating. We seek, nay, we crave, closure. We prefer the safety of an answer, any answer, to the peril-frought seas of ambiguity. Well, most of us. Me? I’ve long accepted that answers, definitiveness, are rarities. The universe, life itself, is a chaos. That acceptance is true adulthood.

But many — too many — are still psychological kids. They yearn for a holy father to watch over them and give them clear, concise, inarguable guidance. And whenever the argument becomes muddy, whenever answers seem as distant as the farthest shore, they fall back on god, whoever he may be. Who, after all, can argue with the creator of the universe?

These days, he’s the guy who wrote the US Constitution.

Okay Fellas, Get Your Steno Pads Out.

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Gabfest

Here’s the link to yesterday’s Big Talk, featuring criminal defense attorney Amelia Lahn. She does a brisk business, in large part, defending young men who’ve been accused of sexual assault on college campuses.

Honestly, my ulterior motive for asking her on the show was to find the A. to the Q.: How in the hell can you stand up for these lunkheads? Of course, the question is almost criminally simplistic. Click the link for her answer and more.

Amelia Lahn [Image: M. Elizabeth Hershey.]

Wissing

Next week, Doug Wissing joins me in the WFHB studios to discuss his latest book project, a history of the CIA. Dang, mang. That’s a task I’d be tempted to shy away from — talk about murky seas! Wissing, though, has a lot of experience delving into — diving into — confusing, bewildering waters. To wit, his books on our endless Afghanistan adventure, Funding the Enemy and Hopeless but Optimistic.

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Credulity

I crowed on social media yesterday that I’d just unfriended a conspiracy theorist. Most of the subsequent commenters, basically, yelled Right on! One, though, himself a noted CT, immediately demanded to know which conspiracy my erstwhile “friend” had espoused. Other commenters had asked the same thing, but less demandingly.

So, here’s the answer: My CT guy wanted to know why some Parkland, Florida high school shooting survivor — I think this is how it goes — also was at a bazillion other mass school shootings. Ergo, the conspiracy goes, the kid’s a crisis actor and yadda, yadda, yadda. It ain’t worth a nanosecond of my time to even consider the question.

Now get this: Acc’d’g to Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse, the “crisis actor” charge actually has deep roots in this holy land’s racist past. Kruse teaches a course on how to discern valid sources from garbage and has found that the likes of the Little Rock 9 — the black students who, in 1957, tried to attend an all-white school in the Arkansas capital and were met with raging, abusive crowds — were instantly accused of being paid actors rather than simply kids who wanted to go to a decent school. And then, all the way back to the post-Civil War years, former slaves who’d testified before Congress about how they continued to be denied their rights as American citizens in the Reconstruction South, also were charged with being paid actors.

[A CMA Note: I mentioned America’s “racist past” above. Don’t for a minute think I think racism is past here.]

Anyway, crisis actors and conspiracy theories are nothing new in America. And, thanks to my old pal Andy Wallingford in Louisville, I just learned of another one. Reddit recently went bonkers over the Great Mattress Firm Conspiracy. Yep, the bed co., this theory holds, has way too many locations in the United States, selling a product that most of us buy only once in ten years or more. The conclusion? Mattress Firm, owned by some South African conglomerate, is laundering money through these many stores (there are more than 9000 of them), ostensibly for the purpose of saving the bacon of the conglomerate’s top management who’ve been playing fast and loose with the outfit’s books for years.

What can the next conspiracy theory possibly be? I can wait to find out.

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