Gun Control and the Ballistic Blame-Shifting Syndrome
There exists a curious mental phenomenon among modern peoples in general and modern Americans in particular. Even some who profess the name of Christ display this same intellectual oddity.
It is the for them, seemingly insurmountable tendency to shift individual culpability for personal sins either to the environment in which they live or in the case of today’s topic, to a morally neutral inanimate object. We’ll call it “ballistic blame shifting syndrome.”
Meet the “Forgotten Winchester.”
The forgotten Winchester is a model 1873 lever action utility rifle, chambered in the 44-40 caliber cartridge. The gun that won the west. Its serial number indicates that this specimen was manufactured in 1882. What makes this well-known and once very common firearm unique is that in 2014 it was discovered resting upright against an old juniper tree in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park.
The condition of the wood furniture and steel components, along with the fact that the butt stock had naturally sunken several inches into the soil beneath it, indicated that it had been mysteriously abandoned there around the turn of the 20th century and had been sitting untouched ever since.
For those suffering from “ballistic blame shifting syndrome,” the greatest mystery of all would seem to be how, in the name of all that’s sensible and right, this gun has managed not to kill anybody in the last hundred years.
It is after all an instrument of carnage and destruction, responsible for untold numbers of brutal and senseless deaths. Can it really be true that this evil and depraved mechanism of murder has failed to transport, load, point and fire itself at an innocent child?
After a century?
Surely this must be alt-right propaganda. All good people understand that “gun crimes,” that is, crimes committed by guns, are a national epidemic. They must be strictly controlled, or if possible, removed from otherwise peaceable law-abiding private hands altogether. Clearly, they turn men into monsters.