Democrats Love Saying That AR-15s Should Only Be Used On Foreigners
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Every time there's a mass shooting in America with an AR-15, high-level Democrats line up to proclaim that those weapons should only ever be used to kill impoverished foreigners.
The latest example of this ongoing phenomenon was Illinois Senator and Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth telling the press that a recording from the July 4th Highland Park shooting which killed seven people and wounded dozens more reminded her of her combat experience overseas, saying the US needs to do better within its own borders.
"I just listened to the sound of that gunfire from one of the videos that was captured," Duckworth said. "And let me tell you that the last time I heard a weapon with that capacity firing that rapidly on a Fourth of July was Iraq, it was not the United States of America. We can and we should and we will do better."
This was not the first time Duckworth has repeated this demented Democratic Party refrain. Last month during the controversy which followed the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Duckworth tweeted, "I carried an M16 and M4 in the military, so let me be clear: High-powered rifles designed for our troops to engage an enemy with accurate, lethal fire at a velocity of 3,000 feet per second have no place on our streets. I fully support an assault weapons ban."
Obviously American weapons of war kill far more people overseas than they do domestically, and those killings are done in wars of aggression for power and profit which are sold to the public with lies and propaganda, so they've got no higher moral standing than the killings of any mass shooter. But because the Democratic Party exists only to kill leftward movement in the United States and ensure the continual functioning of a globe-spanning empire, gun violence is seen at its highest echelons not as a moral issue which should be opposed everywhere but as a wedge issue which should be exploited for campaign donations.
We saw this illustrated in a notorious 2017 tweet from now-US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeig which said, "I did not carry an assault weapon around a foreign country so I could come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen."
Silly Republicans! Assault weapons are for killing foreign kids!
Another classic came from Instagram progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019: "Weapons of war, specifically designed to kill human beings en masse, should not be available for purchase."
Cool beans, AOC. Leave the killing en masse to the American stormtroopers exterminating brown-skinned poor people for resource control.
We saw this "those bullets belong in foreign bodies" Democratic talking point seeded way back in 2013 by that masterful empire manager Barack Obama.
"These weapons of war, when combined with high-capacity magazines, have one purpose: to inflict maximum damage as quickly as possible," reads an Obama White House statement. "They are designed for the battlefield, and they have no place on our streets, in our schools, or threatening our law enforcement officers."
The line "Weapons of war have no place on our streets" would go on to be parroted, again and again and again, by Democratic Party candidates and officials for years. Hillary Clinton regurgitated it verbatim during her 2016 campaign. Biden said it on the campaign trail in 2019. We heard the slogan "Weapons of war have no place on our streets" repeated word-for-word by Democratic Party war hawks like Dianne Feinstein, Adam Schiff, and Seth Moulton.
"Weapons of war don't belong on our streets." You can learn so much about the Democratic Party's true nature just from those eight words. Those weapons do not belong on our streets, they belong on someone else's streets. Far away streets. The streets where our wars are. We shouldn't have to see that stuff!
Some pundits take it a step further and call for the US to actually physically ship all the nation's AR-15s overseas to be used in Washington's proxy war in Ukraine:
That's the Democratic Party for you. Progressive in the streets, murderous imperialists in the sheets. That unique brand of psychopathy that can posture and preen as a compassionate voice of sanity before the voting public, turn around and help gun down everyone in the Global South for crude oil and Raytheon profit margins, and then go to bed and not lose a wink's sleep over it.
That's the face of the Nice Guy Empire, also known as the rules-based international order, also known as the liberal world order, also known as the US-led world order. It presents the facade of humanitarianism and democratic ideals, but underneath the performance it's just as savage and bloodthirsty as any other empire in history.
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Although it chills me to say this, I think that the vein of violence that is rooted in indigenous genocide and African slavery also circulates the blood supply that nourishes both empire energy and capitalist entrepreneurship. As such, the depth to which both domestic and international violence are ingrained and interwoven into the fabric of US society is terribly unlikely to suddenly unravel and modulate itself. This makes both gun violence and neocolonialist imperialism almost inevitable as symptoms of the late-stage neoliberal capitalist experiment. Am I a pessimist or a realist? I can't quite decide.
This: "It presents the facade of humanitarianism and democratic ideals, but underneath the performance it's just as savage and bloodthirsty as any other empire in history."
More reasons to shut down the empire once and for all!