America has an outburst every time they threaten to disarm her of her guns. She needs them, she insists, in case she ever has to defend herself against tyrannical government.

“And is she planning to overthrow the government?” one might ask? No, she has no such plan.

Yet every day she complains of the increase and corruption and tyranny, and the choke hold that the powers that be have on her country.

And if one were to puzzle aloud as to why she needs the guns for a defense she has no intention of mounting, she will adjust the rhetoric and say that she would never actually shoot unless the government starts shooting the citizens first. And so we discover that, despite all the raring and shorting, and the waving of the Gadsden Flat—“Don’t tread on me!”—this is her new definition of tyranny. She has raised the barre of tyranny so as to allow anything less than the murder of citizens to pass under as something else.

And so the tyrant and scoundrel have free reign of the country. As long as they don’t start shooting the citizens, they can have anything else they want. And they’ve long been busy, taking it bit by bit, until poverty looms even on the career class, whose jobs would have earned them a good living a generation ago.

Given the sad state of things that is now so passively endured, one might wonder why America is so adamant about having those guns for that mythical final showdown. Indeed, if the tyrants and scoundrels can have everything else, one wonders why they would ever need to murder the citizens in the first place! As long as we’re docile, why not continue to make use of us?

Yes, it’s a ridiculous way of thinking, but you must understand that she behaves this way because she has already been disarmed of the character it takes to think straight—which is the same character it takes to oversee a society and its government diligently and judiciously. Of this, she has already been disarmed—at school and at church, and as she sat in front of the screen.

And so she sits, even now, holding dearly to her guns, even as she pretends that she has not already lost the greater weapon—with which she might actually have a stab at running a mostly-just society and government alike, even without bloodshed. And I’m going to have to sit her for a while to come up with another example of irony that’s stronger than this one.