At what point is America no longer a safe place for me to live?

[Rev. Rye]

Like AWTY just said, there’s clearly going to be groups that are more clearly in danger than others (and it’s safe to assume that the farther you are from being a white, cisgender, straight, Christian man who supports Trump, the less safe you are), but I don’t think it’s really all that safe for anyone.

Remember how four days ago, some dickhead shot up a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park and killed 7 people in the process? I think I’ve mentioned that I live in the suburbs of Chicago before, but let me put into perspective how close I Was to the shooting: the night before, I went to Ravinia to see Classical Mystery Tour, and as we left, we drove past the shooter’s house. My therapist lives close enough to Highland Park that I actually felt the need to ask if she was there when it happened (she wasn’t, fortunately.) Because of the shooting, the Fourth of July celebrations at my hometown were canceled (both the parade and the fireworks show) in case the shooter decided to go south and continue his spree. My Dad apparently knew some people who got caught up in the crossfire. And, as far as I can tell, the shooter didn’t even have a good reason for doing it (or even anything that might look like a good reason if you squint hard enough.)

And yet, this isn’t all that remarkable. Hell, there was a period this spring where at least one mass shooting that fit the FBI’s criteria for mass murder happened every week. And even though there’s a pretty strong correlation between our extremely lax gun laws and our high rate of gun deaths (and the fact that massacres like this happen far more often than one would expect from nations that aren’t in the middle of a war), one of the major political parties has made explicit that they don’t give a shit. That the right to shoot off an AR-15 is more important than the right for people to not fucking die, and apparently, it’s because of an amendment in the Bill of Rights that only makes sense when you consider that it was written when people were still divided on whether or not combining the various state militias into one large national army would even be worth it. And shit will be so bad that even Piers Morgan will look like the voice of reason in comparison with these guys:

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On a less heavy note, the gun guy is kind of right about the Kinder egg situation. And I say kind of because a few months after this debate, they’d release a variant in the US called Kinder Joy, but instead of a chocolate egg with a capsule full of tiny toys inside, it’s a capsule with one half devoted to the candy and cream (eaten in a different way from the Kinder Surprise egg) and one half with a toy and a spoon to eat the other half with. The original version, however, remains illegal stateside.

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