Here in Karen County, where the profession of Elizabeth Warren–level scold and harridan is a solid post-menstrual career choice, you only have to wait a couple of hours for a member of our local Karen coven to go online scoffing at the outpouring of prayers in the wake of any mass slaughter inflicted by a gun-wielding psycho.  

I wish I could say Karen County is the land of milk and honey, but really, it’s the land of Lennon’s “Imagine” coupled with the sage aphorisms of a Bernie or Mamdani.  So, inevitably, one of my county’s always-to-be-counted-upon gun ban–worshipers went on our neighborhood website this week to snipe that “prayers don’t heal gunshot wounds.” 

I guess this passes as wisdom or an acute insight, even though nobody has ever claimed that prayers do that.  But Ms. Scold needed a cute way to introduce her cliché-ridden plea that, for the sake of the children, we must ban everything from AR-15s to cap guns.  Children have the “right” to be safe in their classrooms, a condition that apparently will occur only when every gun in the land has been confiscated and destroyed. 

The problem is that any “right” needs a mechanism for defending it.  For example, if you don’t want a deranged, spit-flecked German chancellor to make good on his threat to destroy you, you pound him and his genocide-loving country until the threat is gone — using guns.  This is how you defend the basic right to survive. 

Apparently, Ms. Scold thinks confiscation, plus hanging up yet more “This Is a Gun-Free Zone” proclamations, will protect the right of our babies to be safe from pistol-toting nutjobs.  Everybody knows that if FDR had hung a banner from the Statue of Liberty, “We Are a Peace-Loving Country, No Guns Here!,” we could have avoided going on a massive, terribly expensive, heavily armed hunting expedition for the Head Nazi’s head. 

What will never occur to Karens is what the old bumper sticker from the 1960s used to proclaim, “When Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Guns.”  Yes, only extreme right-wing MAGA neo-Nazi Christian nationalists would proclaim such a thing, but there’s still an undeniable logic to it.  Outlaws are simple to define: They don’t obey laws. 

But Ms. Scold does not think in logical categories.  She conveniently forgets that for every law that has ever been passed, there are people — criminals, rebels, outcasts, morons — who disobey it.  Disobedient people go way back to the Garden and today are as normal a part of the human scene as acne, woke Disney movies, and timid men who cry themselves to sleep each night longing to imitate Tim Walz’s Hulk-type masculinity. 

You could cite the thousands of occasions each year when an armed citizen has stopped a crime, murder, or mass murder through the simple expedient of killing or wounding a wannabe Dylan Klebold.  But, but, they sputter, that’s violence!  It uses guns!  If there are no guns, there will be no violence! 

You get the feeling that people who reason this way failed that very early post-birth test parents pull on a baby: Peekaboo.  First something is there in the baby’s sight, and then it’s not.  A wise kid catches on real soon: The damned thing is hiding, but it’s still there.  Karen the Scold flunked that early test.  She really believes that if something is hidden, or put out of sight, or confiscated, it no longer really exists.  

Then, when the unimaginable, outlawed event happens yet again, a mass slaughter by a gunman, the response must be to put up bigger, bolder Gun Free Zone signs and to step up efforts to control guns once and for all by expropriating the antique gun collections of the Smithsonian, the American Legion, and the deplorables in Texas and Appalachia.  

Make it so, and our babies will be forever safe!  

(But wait, what about gun-toting BPOCs?  “No,” says the Scold, “that’s different.  For example, our Latinx are colorful brown people with colorful dances and colors, who cook nice food and built our country and successful trips to the moon by picking lettuce and being colorful.  They absolutely need to have a means of defending themselves against racist white people!”)

Image via Pixabay.