The assassination of a Minnesota state representative and the attempted assassination of a state senator is the sort of thing there can be no tolerance for in this day and age. It’s something that, at least on the surface, most of us on either side of the political divide agree on. It’s kind of refreshing that there is a line that neither side thinks should be crossed for a change.
But author Stephen King, best known for books like Carrie and It, has thoughts.
I suppose you could call them “thoughts,” anyway.
See, he knows who and what to blame for the attacks, and it’s not necessarily the killer.
Stephen King is famous for making up tall tales. From “Salem’s Lot” – a tale about politicians sucking the lifeblood out of Maine locals (just kidding) – to “Christine” (a story reminiscent of Richard Matheson’s legendary “Duel”) with its possessed, self-driving car, he’s spun words better than many political speechwriters to deliver pretend messages that have thrilled and chilled millions.
But, like so many other ill-informed or uninformed Americans, Mr. King just took a page out of his own fictive universe to callously lay the blame for multiple homicide on, you got it, an inanimate object: the tool that the alleged killer used.
Awr Hawkins reports for Breitbart that King June 16 used his writing skills on X to spin a yarn in just a few words, writing:
“Vance Boelter is clearly as nutty as a fruitcake. The real culprit is the gun he used. They’re everywhere, and it’s years too late to put that genie back in the bottle. Nuts are gonna do nutty, violent things, and guns are easily obtainable.”
…
As with most gun-grabbers, King’s implication is that government bans on firearms and infringements on the natural right to keep and bear arms would make the world safer. Such statist acts would save lives and curb violent crime.
The statistics showing that greater gun ownership correlates to lower violent crime are clear. John Lott spelled out in “More Guns, Less Crime” that comparisons of neighboring counties with similar populations saw violent crime decrease in the counties that allowed concealed carry, while the others rose.
King’s world is fiction, which he’s made quite a good living creating, so I’m not surprised he’d spin more fiction in blaming the guns for this.
Sure, Boelter is nutty–King and I agree on that–but this idea that “guns are easily obtainable” is nonsense.
They’re not as difficult to obtain as they are in most other countries, but they’re not super easily obtainable, either. That’s a BS talking point that many try to make because we actually have some respect for natural law in this country.
Minnesota has universal background checks on handguns, along with other gun control laws, and Boelter wasn’t inhibited by any for the simple reason that he had no reason to be denied a firearm.
I know King sees that as a bad thing, but if we’re going to respect rights in this country, there has to be actual respect for those rights.
Yet what King has forgotten is the assassination of Shinzo Abe.
Abe was shot to death in Japan, which has some of the toughest gun control laws in the world. The assassin cobbled together a gun to use, which amazingly didn’t blow up on him. Brandon Herrera built one for YouTube, fired it, and got smacked by YouTube for it, but the truth is that Abe did it, and Boelter could have, too. Allegedly.
And that’s without considering the thousand other ways he could have committed such an atrocity.
But King writes fiction, and in fiction, things need to be neat and tidy. Reality has no such constraints.
Maybe he should go back to writing disturbing orgies like in “It” and leave politics to people who understand the real world
Read the full article here
