Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Private Prisons, White Nationalists, and Left-Liberals Come Together to Support Gun Control

Let’s make a deal | Pixabay

WASHINGTON, DC–An unlikely group of allies has found common cause on gun control.

The nation’s leading private prison operators, fringe white nationalists, and respectable Democrats are funding a new organization called Bite the Bullet, which seeks to advance strict new gun control legislation. The new initiative was quickly formed in the wake of the recent school shooting in Florida, which claimed the lives of 17 individuals.*
“We’re just a group of patriotic Americans who felt the need to do something to protect our nation’s children,” explained Adam Taft, who serves as spokesman for Bite the Bullet. “We may not agree on everything, but when it comes to gun control, we all want the same thing.”

Less than a week since its founding, Bite the Bullet has managed to build an impressive following on social media. Their Twitter handle alone boasts an impressive 100,000 followers, only 60% of which are thought to be alt-right bot accounts.

The group has been broadly supportive of most popular gun control proposals, including banning bump stocks, expanding background checks, prohibiting assault rifles, defining assault rifles, and banning high-capacity magazines. Bite the Bullet has also promoted summarily detaining minorities in order to get around some of the constitutional hang-ups associated with stop-and-frisk, which was a popular gun control enforcement tactic before the jerks at the ACLU went and ruined it.

The common thread in most of the advocacy from Bite the Bullet is that new laws need to be enacted. Taft noted that the group supports zealous enforcement of the existing laws and long prison sentences to enhance deterrence. But unlike the NRA and many Republicans, they do not believe the current laws would go far enough even if enforced properly.

While the group is fast becoming an influential voice on gun policy, not everyone supports their message. Naturally, Second Amendment Fundamentalists and so-called libertarians have worked to discredit them by suggesting that simple racism, rather than altruism, may be part of their motivation.

These cynics point to questionable research which asserts that gun control is disproportionately enforced against racial minorities. However, this claim stands in stark contrast to the widely held view that the institutional racism of the US criminal justice system only applies to laws that Republicans support. Notably, CNN’s fact-checkers has awarded the controversial research 7 Tinkerbells, their most incredulous rating.

Bite the Bullet itself denied that racism plays any roll in its policy positions. Their spokesman Taft reiterated that their only concern is reducing gun violence in the homeland.



*This is a satirical post. The coalition and quotes cited above are fictional in nature.

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