Critical Thinking Deficit...

The United States of America has a huge deficit. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 trillion or some such shit. I don't really know what the figure is. Truth be told I don't really think that the figure matters. Here's the thing, I'm no economist and I'm most likely wrong about this, but I think that if the US goes down then the rest of the world who has hitched its economy directly to providing our fat asses with everything our overworked hearts desire is going down with it.

China's economy exists because Walmart won't pay full price for GI Joe's.

So call me ignorant, but I don't really give a shit who the government owes money to. I mean what are they gonna do?

Call in the debt? Good luck with that.
Attack? Have you met the US Air Force? (and they're a bunch of pussies.)
Piss and moan like an impotent jerk? Much better.

The deficit that bothers me is in critical thinking. Mostly because as a nation we just don't do it.

Fox news, MSNBC, CNN, the Onion, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Daily Beast, The Drudge Report, The Daily Kos, and a million other websites, TV shows, and cable news networks exist along with their myriad of apps, emails, and social media bombardment campaigns to provide Americans with quick access to a prepackaged, approved, and vetted opinion complete with talking points and counterpoints for any argument you may receive from someone who regurgitates their opinion from another opposite leaning media outlet.

My aunt is famous for this. It was on O'Reilly! The (insert enemy of the week) taking over the country.

Really, how many companies do they run? How much wealth do they control? How much influence can they peddle?

Those are the real questions you should be asking when watching this shit. Who does this benefit? Why are they telling me this? What do they want me to think? Why do they want me to think it? What are they trying to get me to do?

Critical thinking is what keeps a person from being manipulated. Unfortunately we are populated by a whole lot of easily led lemmings. Now don't get me wrong, I'd grab a lawn chair and a cooler full of beer to watch the majority of them march over the cliff, but then again, we're going to need some of them to dig ditches and make Reese's peanut butter cup Blizzards at the DQ.

Here's a prime example: GUN HOMICIDE IS DOWN!!!

Seems counter intuitive to what you see in the media the majority of the time. Except for the NRA of which I am a member but I also think they need to fire their leadership and get a new crew in there. The one we've got is a little too cold dead hand for me. you can't really reach a audience of today with that sort of shit.

The problem is that too many people have a click-whrrr response to the world.

Someone got shot =  guns are bad.

Now let's do some critical thinking shall we. You can call this a platitude but its a fact. A gun is about as dangerous as a pez dispenser until a human being manipulates it. So that's the first thing.

Now will guns or the lack of them rather decrease violence? Probably not. There will be just as many incidents of violence except now those incidents will be with baseball bats, knives, cars, bricks, or whatever else the wackos can get their hands on.

Will the lack of guns decrease the number of people killed? Of course, if you mean only the number of people killed by guns, not killed overall. That's an easy one. However many people died last year of gun violence, you can cut that number down to...zero or thereabouts. I know we'd have to wait a few millennium for all the guns currently in circulation to get weeded out.

However, you'd probably have to add about 99% of that number to other forms of violence.

Ya see, mass murders, or when the killer offs more than 4 people in one sitting, account for a staggeringly low percentage of gun violence. According to Mother Jones (hippies) there have been about 62 mass shootings since 1982.

Sure there'd be a few here and there that shot 3 and didn't make the list, but I'm sure they are few and far between. So let's examine the other 99 or so percent of gun murders.

If they didn't have a gun they would've:

A) Worked their problems out in a healthy and constructive manner.
B) Found a different and arguably more violent way to kill the motherfucker!

If you said A. Please stop stealing oxygen and food as quickly as possible.
If you said B. Well then you live on earth.

Guns are a choice we need to make as a society. Guns in and of themselves don't really do much. Like so many things. They aren't evil. Fucking people are evil.

Before there were any guns, or weapons of any kind. Cain bashed Abel's head in with a rock. Violence will not decrease. There will be just as much violence, just a different kind of violence. Removing guns from the situation will just make violence the exclusive realm of the young and strong. Funny as it might sound, I don't see too many 70 year old men brawling with me if I ever decided to come into their house and steal their Depends. Sure it could happen but its doubtful.

Guns are an equalizer. Guns are tools. Guns are a choice.

You can't legislate critical thinking and common sense. Sure, if there are guns a bunch of kids every year are going to shoot themselves and one another. Personally, I think that a parent that doesn't properly teach their kids about guns (especially if you have them in the house) should be criminally liable. Murder in the Stupidest degree sounds like a life sentence to me. You've got a kid in the house and you don't lock up your guns and your kid uses your gun to hurt themselves or someone else...guess who's going to get their asshole stretched by Thunder dick in cell block D.

It comes down to this. Guns are not nor have they ever been the problem. The problem was, is and always will be people. Stupid people doing stupid shit. Evil people doing evil things. So I wouldn't worry about outlawing guns, I'd find a way to outlaw stupidity.