It is difficult to argue with those who argue that Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is an ass.
A well-armed one at that, at least in her photos, but an ass nonetheless. She keeps confessing to it, wearing it like a badge of honor.
It's not just some lack of intellectual ability—I mean she did pass her GED exam a few months before winning office, so there's that.
But then she claimed that hammers kill more people than firearms and expressed fear that attackers of the Second Amendment would soon legislate a ban on building tools. I, and my thumb, are in partial agreement with that hammer thing, but I haven't seen the death toll yet, so let's say I'm wavering.
(note: I later learned that, apparently, she heard the word handgun as hammer. That makes sense, especially with her unfamiliarity since Boebert is more an AR-15 mass-casualty type saloonkeeper.)
But before we could forget about the hammer fiasco or forgive her for it, she tweeted this:
"There was just a mass shooting in Denmark, a country with some of the strictest gun laws in Europe. It's time to admit that gun laws DO NOT stop mass shootings!"
No, they don't, Ms. Boebert, but only a dolt, s simpleton, (add your synonym of choice), would compare Denmark with the United States regarding gun violence. Since Denmark is a much smaller country, let's put this in terms that even Ms. Boebert can understand:
In Denmark, one in nine people owns guns, mostly hunting rifles. In America, it's nine in ten, mostly people-hunting rifles—automatic ones.
Denmark ranks 104th in murder rates per million; America, 43rd.
In gun deaths among developed countries, we average just under four in every 100,000 people. The next "worst" is Cypress at 0.63, nearly eight times less deadly. In Japan with only 0.021 per 100,000, the assassin of former president Shinzo Abe had to build his own gun to commit the crime. He got off two shots. There was no random spraying of bullets or collateral dead. One fatality, and even that could have been stopped with decent security.
Denmark? In Copenhagen in February 2015, a 22-year-old man was killed in a shootout with police after an attack that left two people dead and five police officers wounded. No mass murders from then until this past week. America is averaging two deaths a day in July, and two mass shootings a day since January 1 of this year. Not even the most ardent gun apologist should make an asinine comparison with Denmark...or just about any other developed country.
So if it's not simply lack of intellect, what makes someone like Lauren Boebert utter one nonsensical stream of claptrap after the next with hardly a breath in between?
Imagination. She doesn't have any.
Here is a woman who has somehow been able to squeeze off round after round of whatever comes out the barrel of one of her sacred assault weapons but never been able to imagine what might happen to a child caught in the stream of maybe ten projectiles–how such a barrage could literally sever a person's body and reduce it to an unrecognizable mass. I'm not sensationalizing: that was a description of some victims in the Uvalde shooting when identifying the remains became not merely difficult but impossible. Those guns have one intent: damage.
Lauren Boebert has two children. Did she ever imagine?
Most civilized countries with any defensible moral compass prohibit ownership of the weapons Lauren Boebert espouses so fervently. Oh, and Denmark? Fully automatic weapons are prohibited for civilian ownership unless a special permit is issued by the Ministry of Justice.—not some gun show lackey. And these permits are almost never issued except to the police or military.
Even a modicum of higher-level thinking might cause a person to consider, well, maybe we could cut down the ownership of these weapons and possibly stop the occasional Robert Crimo or Salvador Ramos or Stephen Paddock or Adam Lanza. Of course, we won't stop everyone, but what if we save the life of my son/daughter/mother/nephew/aunt/neighbor? What if we save's a local cop/nurse/store clerk/teacher/EMT?
Lauren Boebert has two children. Did she ever imagine?
Imagination forces us to consider the what-ifs, but even something that rudimentary may lie beyond the understanding of someone like Boebert.
Then again, who elected Lauren Boebert? Well...we did, just as we elected hundreds of others who are equally bereft of emotion, history, verbal skills, and humanity. They are our representatives. Shame on us.
Boebert sometimes likes to intone the name of Jesus when she's yelling or tweeting something to stir up her followers, but even though Jesus rode into Jerusalem on one, I think His kinship with asses pretty much ended there. I wonder if she knows that.