WAMPOHOLIC

“No Takedowns. Ever.” That was the defiant message that Cody Wilson delivered in a YouTube video promoting Defense Distributed, an organization he founded dedicated to designing and distributing plans for weapons that anyone can make using a 3D printer at home. But after Defense Distributed was targeted by the U.S State Department, Wilson and his colleagues have taken the plans down, for now.

Reading this, I’ve (at last!) visualized a scenario in which the United States government would have to move against its own citizens. Once the ability to print guns is out there, the US will have to crack down on the option. There will be two sides: those who love printing guns and those who don’t. Those who don’t will acquiesce to restriction. The dudes mass-producing Liberators are going to outright refuse. Violently refuse, as that’s the exact plan they spout in their rhetoric. And the idea of an armed militia assembled because “we love guns” and no other uniting cause sounds impossible for the government to allow for any length of time.

This means that the people most afraid of the night that they fend off a President-approved SWAT raid are the ones hastening its arrival. They are a self-fulfilling prophecy. I didn’t think I could be more bothered by gun nuts, but realizing that they may be the greatest threats to my rights as they blindly swear to defend their own has me grinding my teeth.

According to the CDC, there were 11,078 gun homicide deaths in the United States in 2010.

Dunbar’s Number suggests that the maximum number of people your brain can manage an emotional connection with at any one time is ~150.

So 1,661,700 people is around the maximum number of people who lost someone to gun violence in 2010. 

The US had a population of 311,591,917 as of 2011.

It would take 187 years worth of time for everyone, with no overlap and in a vacuum, to lose a loved one to gun violence.

I was one of that yearly 0.5% of the US population in 2012.

I’m not a statistics guy; using Dunbar’s Number in the first place isn’t even scientific, but I would bet that if you had to number the people you would openly sob about should they die (like I did about Mitt) it would be less than 150, so it should be fair for the purposes of this piece. With all of this, we should agree that a very generous proportion estimate for the number of people left emotionally distraught thanks to a gun homicide is 0.5% yearly.

And now I’m going to let emotion take over. I think there’s a point to my conclusion here, and if you meet me halfway by keeping the above proportion in mind, it will at least make some sense no matter what your opinion on gun control is: 

I want to get rid of guns.

How many gun show attendees, browsing racks upon racks of weapon options, let their eyes fall on a Glock and remember that one was used to execute a friend? How many Smith & Wesson lobbyists live in an area with any gun violence? How many suburban conservative white gun-owners have had a loved one shot through the chest and left to bleed out in a fucking drive-in theater parking lot? How many of the most vocal proponents of the right to bear arms have had arms borne against them?

If you think my position on gun control is extreme, I urge you to remember that I’ve been through an extreme situation. A situation that’s being called a gun “accident” by the defendant’s lawyer. And if this sort of havoc can be brought to my life by a gun “accident,” what destruction can a person with purpose bring to our lives? And if you are willing to allow that sort of destruction because you need a handgun to protect your milquetoast spouse and 2.5 kids from the eventual night when uzi-toting criminals (minorities, naturally) raid your gated community: fuck you. If you’re okay with letting me suffer like I once did/am doing/will continue to do because you’re paranoid that our government is going to finally attack its own citizens and you’ll need a .22 cal to defend against its tanks, missiles, air strikes, drones, nerve gas, etc: fuck you. As someone who can identify with choosing pleasure over personal responsibility, I can most understand the reasoning of people who just want to shoot some beer cans off the backyard fence every once in awhile. But if you would rather have that over letting me have my friend alive: fuck you.

I realize this is just as emotionally-charged as the platform of the people I’m railing against, but I might be able to convince you of a distinction: my feelings come from loss in my heart and their hearts are full of fear. Fear that they chose! They are afraid, they are such scared pissy beings (I mean I imagine them so frightened that they cannot ever cease pissing), they need protection, they can’t accept the tension of existence. I do not need a gun because I go out into the world with my eyes open and myself ready to die; never ever ever willing or wishing death, but knowing that it can happen, it can happen to anyone, and it has just as much of a chance as coming from a bullet as from a meteor or a stroke, and the infinitesimal ward of a weapon on my person is just not worth knowing I’m contributing to a culture of killing.

And that’s where I’ll land, cause this is my tumblr and I’m sick of looking sad in this coffee shop. They choose fear. I choose love. Good for me.

I have so much to do and I just spent the last two hours composing this because I couldn’t help myself after reading the article. Thank you for being my friend. Please realize that I can be friends with people who hold a less extreme position than me even when I say “fuck you” to the tiny little part of them that I dislike. That’s what I mean by choosing love. I miss Mitt.

This overview of the community supporting prolific rapper/messiah Lil B (and each other) makes me wish I could devote my life to the Based God Mythology. But the main drawback is that I would have to devote my entire life to the Based God mythology. There’s so much. Tract after tract, and that would just cover Keke, Based Cat.

Rob Rhinehart is an Atlanta native who was interviewed just last week about his new delicious smoothie, Soylent. Hitting the scene just in time to fucks with the Shamrock Shake revenue, Soylent is a creamy mixture of every nutrient you need to survive! No more food necessary! Since my tongue is white and yesterday I was hit by waves of nausea from noon on, I’m thinking about signing up as a tester!

While I believe that the future use of drones in military (and day-to-day life!) is inevitable, we need ironclad laws to hold our government and, eventually, ourselves accountable for their use. It will not be long before drones are delivering you pizza and filming traffic jams for the nightly news, so the grey area surrounding their one current function is troubling.

I bet that it’s pretty hard to write an even-handed profile of Lindsay Lohan at this point. I know I couldn’t (bc i love her). But Rodrick manages to follow every late arrival on set with a selfless gesture, every unprovoked freak-out with a heartfelt semi-confession, and ends up revealing more about Lindsay than People has ever managed. It also helps that everyone (well, besides James Deen) comes out looking pretty shitty anyway. The Canyons viewing party, anyone? Everyone?

My dad sent this to me, and then both Coke Talk and Rob Delaney posted it, so there are my stupid two cents, dumb Brian, stupid

“Bolan enlisted in the Army at age 18 and served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a Green Beret, even though newer novels don’t make any reference to this as it makes him seem too old.”

“As well as being in two nuclear explosions, Mack has been knifed numerous times and shot several times in various parts of his body, most recently in his left shoulder. He has been in numerous grenade explosions and several warehouse roofs have come down on his head.”

It’s funny to imagine a 70 year old secret agent who has been in caught in two nuclear explosions (which is one more than one nuclear explosion, which is generally thought to be a lot).

I’m in a car for at least 1.5 hours a day. That’s not a complaint, because I’ve taken the chance to listen to several new albums (Kendrick Lamar!), classic stand-up comedy (Bill Cosby?), and my first ever podcast: Uhh Yeah Dude. Jonathan Larroquette, son of actor John Larroquette and one half of a band I’ve written about before, Jogger, meets up to chat with former actor (Crossroads, y’know, Britney Spears) and near-Luddite Seth Romatelli. That’s it. They chat. No guests, very little structure, they just find offbeat articles and stories and then riff on them, usually exaggerating the death of society. Sometimes they play games like “Beer Weed Mind’s Eye,” where Seth provides three names and Jah has to guess which is the microbrew, which is the strain, and which he came up with. My favorite part is picking up on their speech patterns and habits, which I imagine is a big part of podcasts anyway but c’mon i’m a podvirgin. I’ve already found myself talking like these dudes, and I’m only seven episodes in their 346(!) ep library.

Seatbelts.

More than a decade after its release, a copy of SNES classic NBA Jam featuring voiceover outtakes is sent anonymously to this website. “Boomshakalaka!” will never ring out with the same purity.

“Grabs his johnson!”

While I’m not sure if I enjoyed the rambling chatter style of this article, it did grab me, probably because it convinced me that its point is true: teenage girls are the focal point of culture.

Good to know that my Mr. Mime, who goes by “Prostate,” and the Onix known as “ErectDong” are gonna make the cut.

Even though it doesn’t translate to real world dollars (just self-good-feeling dollars), I broke a prototype version of this story in my Magazine Writing class five months ago and hinted at this sort of publicity being the best way to combat the actions of Predditors. I even managed to interview Violentacrez over the course of several days. Check it after the jump.

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