Sunday, August 30, 2015

When Tinfoil Hats Meet The Morning News...

     I realize that thinking before you post on the internet is something that died a long time ago, if it ever existed.

     But Internet, you've truly outdone yourselves this week.

     Now, I don't typically get into the whole gun control debate all of ever anymore, mostly because you can't even suggest the idea of stronger background checks without somebody accusing you of personally helping President Obama go door-to-door and round up everybody's guns. (And if he is, he'd better get on it; he's only got another year or so!) You almost have to be impressed with the sheer number of people the NRA has convinced to buy into that line of garbage. But at this point, it's gone far beyond that for some people.

     Case in point: the on-air murder of a television reporter and cameraman in Roanoke Virginia earlier this week. As you can imagine, that has provoked this particular debate anew, but not entirely for the reason you might think: There are actually people who believe that said shooting was a hoax, a "false flag" if you will, somehow set up by the government, as part of a pretense to curtail your Second Amendment right to own as many automatic rifles as you can get your hands on, because Barack Hussein Obama's gonna come take 'em away and suspend the Constitution! Jade Helm! Agenda 21! And if you're the kind of person that believes that the government somehow infiltrated the newsroom of a TV station , found an ex-employee with legitimate anger issues, and set up the fake murder of two people live on the morning news so they could take your guns away, then you probably need to have your guns taken away.

     Nothing about this theory makes any sense. "She didn't react and bleed when he fired the first shot!" Apparently, everyone who's ever seen an episode of "CSI" now fancies themselves a forensics expert.Well, he was also shooting with his camera in the other hand... is it possible that maybe he missed while trying to record his shot? I'm guessing most TV news personalities aren't trained marksmen. "They didn't even notice he was standing there!" Ever been on live television? Any journalist worth a damn is trained to focus only on the camera and the interview subject when doing a live remote. "Why aren't there any witnesses?" Uh... it was 6:30 in the fucking morning? And what about the police chase? The suspect was somehow paid off to shoot and kill himself? The interviewee in the hospital with bullet wounds? Hell, the hospital staff? The anchor back in the studio? I'm expected to believe that all of these people were paid off and kept quiet so Obama would have an excuse to take your guns and declare martial law? The tinfoil hat brigade is really asking me to suspend a whole lot of disbelief here, and I'm a firm believer that the most obvious explanation is usually the correct one. And the most obvious explanation here doesn't involve hundreds of people being paid off by the federal government.

     Look, I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. (Hell, I'm a Detroit sports fan; by very definition, we believe the fix is perpetually in against us by the media, referees, sports leagues, etc.) And I can understand why people are cynical and distrusting at times. But for god's sake, these are real people, with real families, that were just torn apart by some deranged wackjob with a score to settle against some former co-workers, and white people in general, evidently. And you're going to insult these people's families and argue that no, they didn't just lose a son, a daughter, a co-worker, a fiancee? Tell them that they're not expressing their grief properly because the reporter's father went on CNN and mentioned his support for gun control?

     Yes, just in case they might still have any remaining shred of faith in humanity, their co-workers and significant others have been harassed on social media by the 'truther' crowd, and those are truly the lowest kind of scum on this planet. The same people that came out of the woodwork around the time of the Sandy Hook shooting and called that a fake as well. It's almost expected anymore that after any major tragedy in this country, there'll be that contingent of Alex Jones worshipers that show up claiming how it was all just a false flag planted by the Freemasons, or Bilderbergs, or whatever-the-NWO-bogeyman-of-the-day-is. And these people have the audacity to tell the friends and family of those whose lives were taken that they are the delusional ones.

     Apparently human decency isn't that damned human anymore.

     Do you seriously need to see a dead body to believe what you saw? Hell, would that even be enough to convince you? Are you that paranoid that you can't take events like these at face value, that you insist in the face of video evidence that no, the government must have staged this?

     If so... then they've probably got the right idea not wanting people like you to have access to guns.

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