A strange, uncomfortable question continues to hover in the periphery of my mind, but before I ask it, I need to make something clear right up front, so there can be no twisting of what I’m about to say (or at least so that twisting does not go unchallenged):

I do not own a gun and detest guns.I abhor and condemn violence.I believe the Second Amendment has been intentionally perverted by Right-leaning Americans to justify an unhealthy adoration of weapons that no human being outside of a war zone should have access to.

Having said that, as I look around at the America outside my window, I have to ask, “Where the hell did all the Second Amendment Conservatives go?”

For decades, whenever we’ve lamented the national scourge of firearm deaths and mass shootings, and when we’ve pleaded with them to partner with us in passing sensible gun safety legislation, they’ve parroted back the God and Guns, “come and take it”, propaganda that their politicians, preachers, and pawpaws had indoctrinated them into.

“We need our arsenal of military-grade ammunition to protect America,” they would assure us with doomsday prognostications, “in case our Government becomes tyrannical and turns on its citizenry!”

The right to bear arms, they have always maintained, is critical in ensuring that the people’s other rights are never violently taken away by those in leadership.

That has turned out to be ornamental valor, simply hollow declarations of a courage they never possessed and a patriotism that was nonexistent.

Their well-armed Militia cowboy promises were always a coward’s deflection.

We’re now ten months in to a fascist regime led by a morally and mentally untethered authoritarian that, together, have weaponized the Military against the American people in ways we have rarely experienced in the life of this nation… and our supposedly willing Conservative defenders have disappeared.

As entire cities are being besieged, as human beings are being indiscriminately brutalized, as the freedoms to speak and assemble and peacefully protest are literally being trampled upon by a group of masked, deputized sociopaths—the tough-talking Conservative dudes who insisted they wanted to be the hard line between the people and the tyrants are nowhere to be found.

Well, that isn’t exactly true.

They can be found among those masked, deputized sociopaths, terrorizing this nation without accountability, or cheering as they march by.

They can be found at home comfortably behind anonymous social media handles, gleefully celebrating as unarmed human beings are tear-gassed, showered with rubber bullets, driven into the pavement, and arrested without cause.

They can be found safely nestled in church pews, amen-ing incendiary sermons declaring the oppressive Government occupation of Blue cities part of God’s plan to wipe out the supposed woke Liberal agenda.

They can be found in Congress, in State Houses, and in local lawmaking chambers, wearing AR-15 lapel pins and moving lockstep with a Presidential Administration that embodies the very lawless and unchecked power they always warned us the Clintons, Obama, Biden, and Kamala were going to visit upon this nation.

They can be found in coffeeshops, on neighborhood phone apps, at our family gatherings, and on Twitter, applauding Trump’s crushing of the mythical ANTIFA, Soros-funded hordes, comprised of soccer moms, teenagers, clergy, and people in frog inflatables, that they’re pretending to be threatened by.

This is because the performative Conservative Second Amendment cheerleaders have never had any interest in actually protecting America from its Government, should it decide to abandon legal and moral law and lay waste to their nation. They merely wanted a false flag to wave about a day they believed would never come, while they stockpiled the weapons that made them feel tough when they went to Walmart. They certainly never intended to stand up for the humanity of people of color or immigrants or queer people.

Again, I am not by any means saying that we need a violent group of gun-wielding citizens to stand in our streets and defend our people against the brutality and illegality of this tyrannical Administration, because we unequivocally do not.I’m just saying that this is precisely the violation of our Constitutional rights that tens of millions of Second Amendment Conservatives always claimed they were preparing for and why they wanted to be armed, and it turns out they were lying or are cowards... and the rest of us aren’t surprised.

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