Political Memes

The problem with guns is that there's too much ambient stress and so we have a lot of guys running amok.

In the Malay Peninsula men would sometimes lose their mind and indiscriminately start killing their fellow villagers, and there was nothing for it but for a response group to overwhelm him, hold him down and kill him. They called it meng-âmuk from which we get the expression to run amok.

Here in the states we have the same problem. People -- mostly men with right-wing-leaning tendencies -- keep running amok. But the problem is exacerbated because our population is big, so more of them pop off. And we have an awful lot of guns, which make the situation much worse.

Hence on October 1, 2017 Stephen Paddock opened fire from the Mandalay Bay Hotel onto the Route 91 Harvest music festival, killing sixty and injuring ~867, using multiple AR-15 style firearms with bump stocks to make them automatic. It is the worst shooting incident in the US to date. Meanwhile we have small shooting incidents every effing day.

Few people who own and shoot guns actually use them irresponsibly, though the numbers of shooting incidents grow with each year, especially as tension increases between social factions and far-right movements are emboldened. (As with suicides, law-enforcement-involved homicides, and hate crimes, shooting incident rates are also statistically magnified by the presence of Trump as a political figure. It's like his campaign in 2015-2016 gave all of America permission to go batshit crazy.)

So, before we can safely allow guns to be freely obtained and traded, as a nation we need to tone it down a bit, and get our nation back to regularity. Sadly, we re-elected Trump in 2024, and in 2025 he immediately started dismantling the US as a cohesive state, both internally and internationally. This has done a lot to assure the chaos and tension is going to be bad for a long time. And sadly, we're regulating guns less with each year as SCOTUS vetos any regulation, so we Americans are less safe, and more at risk to gun deaths. (But we make up for it with SUVs, which put us at risk of death by vehicle collision.)

All that said, with the rise of the 3D printer and availability of ghost guns, we may make owning legal guns more difficult, but determined shooters will still find ways to acquire them, with Luigi Mangione serving as proof of concept. I think the ultimate path forward is in promoting behavioral health and work-life balance for the entire society, so that fewer people are inclined to use their guns for actual violence. In a better world, we can get back to Atticus Finch using a rifle to put down a rabid dog at range, and then putting it back on the mantle, and that's the incident of the year.

That's unlikely to happen in my lifetime.