Politics has the best euphemisms.
“Undocumented residents” are illegal aliens. “Investing in children” is a tax increase. “Celebrating diversity” is racial quotas. “Currently experiencing homelessness” is, well you know.
It’s “I want to spend more time with my family,” not “What hooker?”
And “racist” is someone who agrees with Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a colorblind society.
But the best euphemisms come from the anti-Second Amendment crowd.
They use “reduce gun violence,” not the truthful “disarm the law-abiding.” And why reduce just gun violence, not all violence? Don’t go down that road, you’ll find yourself asking the Black Lives Matter/all lives matter question and you’ll be a racist. See above.
I never heard their most recent term, “ghost gun,” until Biden was told to use it.
Ghost gun is almost as scary as “assault weapon,” the greatest marketing term created to frighten people who know little about guns. Ask the average person to define an “assault weapon” and you find its like defining pornography. They only know it when they see it.
And the euphemism “the gun lobby” means the NRA, made of about 5 million people, like me, giving bits of money. Whereas the “disarming the law-abiding” lobby is largely one uberbillionaire, Michael Bloomberg, who funds an intersectionality of gunphobic organizations (Yes! Used the woke word “intersectionality”!).
Bloomberg bought himself a wildly successful Colorado legislative session, passing eight bills to hassle legal gun owners and nothing to punish gun criminals. In fact, they refused to pass the only gun bill directed at criminals.
House Bill 1162 would have made the theft of a gun a Class 6 felony, and subsequent thefts a Class 5 felony. This was aimed squarely at criminals, otherwise known as the non-law-abiding, aka, the guys who bring guns into the black market. It died in committee on a party-line vote
These following Democrat state reps who proudly advertise they are working to “reduce gun violence,” including limiting ghost guns and “assault weapons,” by “taking on the gun lobby” didn’t want to punish gun criminals: Reps. Garcia, Herod, Mabrey, Woodrow, Bacon, and Weissman.
Pardon the redundancy coming up.
The legislature passed and the governor signed a bill making it harder for law-abiding people to transport their guns in their cars, leaving them vulnerable if they need access to their firearms. But they voted down a bill to make stealing guns a felony.
The legislature passed and the governor signed a bill to make it harder and more expensive for law-abiding people to get a concealed weapons permit, even though those with such permits have been exemplary citizens, committing no crimes with guns. But they voted down a bill to make stealing guns a felony.
They passed and signed a bill to limit the places where people who have a concealed weapons permit can carry a gun to protect themselves from, oh, I don’t know, maybe a criminal who stole a gun, while they voted down a bill to make stealing guns a felony.
They passed a bill to require federally licensed firearm dealers to spend gobs money and paperwork to get a redundant license from the state of Colorado. The cost will be passed on to customers. And poorer customers, mostly people of color, might be priced out of self-defense. Criminals who steal guns do little paperwork, so they voted down a bill to make stealing guns a felony.
They passed a bill to authorize and fund the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to hassle legal gun dealers, like the federal ATF does, instead of spending that money keeping criminals, maybe gun thieves, behind bars. Good thing they voted down a bill to make stealing a gun a felony.
They passed a bill to force credit card companies to gather information on who legally buys guns and ammunition, ripping away privacy to create a backdoor registration scheme. And they voted down a bill to make stealing a gun a felony.
And they passed a bill seeking a 6.5% sales tax on guns and ammunition (above the already hefty 11% national sales tax), again making self-defense harder to purchase for poorer citizens, people of color, the euphemism for “Black and Brown people.”
Does anyone else find it curious that the gun-taking lobby “reduces gun violence” only by punishing the law-abiding?
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
