Awful Human Culture

I try to stay away from shit like this nowadays but this bit about how the NRA way of life is needlessly destroying lives is just too spot on:

The right-wing belief that "freedom" depends on others having to die for pointless reasons now manifests in all sorts of ways. It can be seen in the resistance to even the most reasonable efforts to fight climate change because heaven forbid you have to get a slightly different kind of light bulb so that your grandchildren can enjoy living on a planet that isn't beset by biblical levels of natural disasters. Or the temper tantrum over Obamacare, which was largely fueled by a willingness to let other people die rather than run even the smallest risk that your doctor's appointment might have to be scheduled a week later. And lately, it has manifested in the right-wing whining over wearing masks in grocery stores or being asked to vaccinate, because the idea that others must die to spare themselves the slightest inconvenience is a bedrock belief of modern conservatism.

The frustrating thing is that, as that 90% support for background checks shows, even most Republican voters aren't completely disdainful for the concepts of the common good or the notion that others have a right to live. Many of them wear masks without much complaint, recycle their trash, and stopped whining about seatbelt laws decades ago. But the Republican Party is controlled by its most extreme elements, in no small part because huge swaths of white America have decided that it's better to let utterly sociopathic politicians be their leaders than to even consider voting for a Democrat. So, whatever their personal preferences on gun control or public health might be, Republican voters end up participating in a system where human life is treated as less valuable than some yahoo's right to own as many boom boom machines as he feels is necessary to distract him from the lingering fear that he'll never be a real man.