“If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.”*
How dare you quote an anarchist! Don’t you realize that through Hunter Biden’s federal gun conviction (Guardian, June 13, 2024) the playing field has been leveled and now Biden is morally superior to the fallen and convicted Trump? I often expect to go out into the world one day with that kind of reasoning and find Alice and the Mad Hatter sitting on my lawn.
But Emma, if I may call her by her first name, was pretty much on the money with a few trimmings here and there changed insignificantly. The question here is whether or not Biden is now morally and ethically superior to Trump since Biden’s son did something that got him into trouble with the feds. By the way, we’ve got just under 400 million guns floating around Dodge City, so Hunter Biden’s, who seems like a troubled soul, gun conviction won’t stop the gun insanity one iota in the US.
Based on NICS (NICS is [the] FBI’s national system that checks records on persons who may be disqualified from receiving firearms.) background data and manufacturing records, it is estimated that there are 393 million civilian-owned firearms in the U.S. Only 6.06 million firearms are registered in America (NFA registrations and states with permits to purchase).
Neither will it, Hunter Biden’s conviction, stop in any demonstrable way Joe Biden’s love for war. After all, the Gaza Strip has been decimated with tens of thousands of kids killed or dead under rubble and no one much gives a damn. Mass starvation reigns there, but as long as I have my supersized burger, who gives a damn? I love the 1960s’ song by Spanky and Our Gang, "Give a Damn". Yes, a critical mass of us in the 1960s gave a damn about war and poverty. A person goes out into an imperfect world and with human flaws sometimes does the best that he/she can. Joe Biden hasn’t done anything material to stop either in a significant way. Now that Gaza has been decimated by Israel with US bombs and other munitions, and the weapons’ manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank, the US can now focus on that most popular of wars in Ukraine. Ukraine has also been decimated at its eastern border and in Crimea. The mass media and the Biden administration and those “Masters of War” (Bob Dylan) will not stop until the last soldier in Ukraine is killed to teach Russia and their awful leader Vladimir Putin that he better learn his place in the world order with the US as the police of the world. After all, look at the police bludgeoning protesters in New York City who dared to question the Gaza genocide for an idea how the police state works on a global level. And you’re an antisemite, and if a Jew who protests genocide, a self-hating one, if you buck the genocide in Gaza, or don’t kowtow to Netanyahu’s religious fundamentalist regime in Israel.
It’s a shitshow and we’re all following the piper over the cliff with the attendant climate catastrophe, income inequality, and hate at levels seldom seen. Of course, the US history of segregation did have more concentrated hate. The ghettos still exist because as a society many, but not all, don’t care enough to stop the inequality between people and could care less about human suffering both here and around the world. Just keep those consumer goods coming!
*Emma Goldman
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”*