“Guns don’t kill people. Alec Baldwin kills people.”
This is what it says on a t-shirt that Donald Trump, Jr, was selling on his website not long after Baldwin accidentally killed the cinematographer and wounded the director when he shot a gun that he was told was “cold,” not loaded with live ammunition, on the set of a film he was producing and starring in. Never mind that it was an accident, a tragic accident. Never mind that the actor is mortified, devastated.
It should be no surprise that the junior Trump exploited this horrific event in a shocking, crass, cruel way to score points with his father’s rabid, red-meat-loving backers. He may also have been sticking it to the actor who so savagely parodied Dad on Saturday Night Live while he was president.
Later, on Twitter, he went on to dig even further: “Spare me your fake sanctimony. The media is in full on panic mode to protect Baldwin from ANY criticism because they agree with his politics.”
J.D Vance, the venture capitalist and memoirist (“Hillbilly Elegy”) running for the U.S senate nomination in Ohio, is one of many has added to the crass Trumpist drumbeat. “Dear @jack,” he tweeted, referring to Twitter head Jack Dorsey, “let Trump back on. We need more Alec Baldwin tweets.”
The question is should we care? Should we care that this is being said, that this is going on? I have friends who tell me I should ignore all this, that I should tune out what Trump and his followers say.
Yes, Trump has been banned from Twitter and Facebook, but his message is still getting out. He is speaking at rallies and conferences, and, clearly, plenty are speaking for him online.
And, yes, as my friends tell me, it would be good for my mental health not to hear all this toxic, hateful, fear-driven stuff.
But sticking our heads in the sand isn’t the answer. It would be nice to ignore this and go on like it’s not out there, but it’s very much out there, and ignoring it definitely won’t help.
For one thing, ignoring it will lead to complacency, which will end up with people not voting. This is how Trumpists and perhaps even Trump will win elections. We need to hear all these awful things, to pay attention to what’s happening and being said out there so that folks get mad and vote against all this.
Even more importantly, we need to pay attention to what’s being said, to that it’s being said, so that we can try to figure out why there is such hate and fear, why so many people are so unhappy that they latch onto this fear and hate and follow and vote for those who would actually harm them (doing away with Obamacare, making it harder to get government assistance, etc.) and how we can work, hopefully together, so that this wasn’t the case.
It would be much easier to ignore this toxicity, to not do this hard work, but, as is evident in how we’ve gotten more and more polarized, more and more apart, to the point where we can’t agree on basic facts, on the truth, we do so at our peril.
We do need to know what the gun proponents say, in order to formulate an argument, which is more important than ignoring opposition to gun control. My argument has always been, how many guns are too many, if billions are never enough? When the right, get's to argue people kill people, I have to shake my head and put accidental shootings, suicides, and statistics alone proves guns are the culprits. Even when obscene irrational arguments for assault rifles are at the forefront politically, my thinking around the second amendment is ammunition, which is not included in the literal language of the Constitution.
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