Hide your wife! Hide your kids! Hide your … puppies? Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert recently went on Newsmax to warn Americans that we’ll all be frying up our pets for dinner if the dastardly Democrats manage to pass an assault weapons ban.
“If the citizenry in America is disarmed, then we are no longer citizens. We are subjects!” she vamped for host Sebastian Gorka, who was hired to do nothing at the Trump White House, and still managed to get fired for incompetence.
“You know here in America, we have gourmet treats for puppies. We have these amazing groomers for dogs,” Boebert went on.
BREAKING: Lauren Boebert thinks “groomers” are “amazing,” MUST CREDIT WONKETTE!
“Well, in Venezuela they eat the dogs. And it started because they don’t have firearms. They do not have a way to protect themselves, to defend themselves against a tyrannical government.”
Did it though? Hmmm.
Leave aside for the moment Boebert’s premise that Americans need weapons so they can shoot members of the oppressive government of which she herself is an elected representative. As when she tweeted out that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been removed from the House chambers on January 6, 2021, Boebert seems pretty sure the militia loons aren’t coming for her.
New Zealanders banned all assault weapons in 2019 after a crazed gunman murdered 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, and they haven’t been forced to subsist on whatever species of three-toed, winged marsupial those Kiwis keep as pets. Yet! (We are kidding, New Zealand, we know you do not keep flying kangaroos as pets. Please keep sending us wine!)
In fact, most of the world’s citizens manage to get along just fine without guns that can murder dozens of people in rapid succession, and they do it without devolving into a hellscape of canine cuisine. America had an assault weapons ban for 10 years starting in 1994, and we were still “the land of the brave, home of the free” — at least in theory. But the wingers sure do like to trot out Venezuela as a cautionary tale of what might happen if Democrats are allowed to implement their “socialist agenda,” i.e. enact popular policies to help people. Let no tragedy go unexploited, right?
In point of fact, the government of Venezuela did enact gun control. And the country is in the throes of economic shortages so severe that the population has been forced to eat any protein they can get their hands on. But just because one thing happened before the other does not mean that there’s a causal relationship. This dingbat may not know what post hoc ergo propter hoc means, but it’s a safe bet that pompous gasbag Gorka does. And he’s probably heard of the resource curse, too.
Venzuela sits on the largest proven oil reserve in the world. It has more oil than Saudi Arabia. And as long as they kept selling it, we didn’t give a shit which murderous dictator ran the country, much less what he did to oppress his own citizens. But like Russia, petrostates rise and fall on the price of oil. So when the price of oil crashed in the mid-2010s, both regimes had to get a lot more oppressive because they couldn’t afford to buy off the population anymore. Yes, we know Boebert ain’t much for book learnin’, but even she can understand that the price of oil fluctuates, although she probably blames Joe Biden for it.
And, yeah, Lauren Boebert is a rancid idiot. But the NRA and other wingnut thought leaders are pushing this bullshit, too, minus the dog angle. Which is gross, and depends on Americans being committed to the project of being A IDIOT.
In summary and in conclusion, it’s probably for the best that Lauren Boebert’s restaurant got shut down. God only knows what was in those burgers. ALLEGEDLY.
OPEN THREAD.
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