Liberals have always attributed supernatural powers to guns, claiming they kill on their own and that they turn normal people into murderous lunatics. Now they have some silly liberal science behind this absurdity. An anthropologist has stated in her liberal opinion that guns really are magical devices that can take any regular person and transform them into a cold-blooded killer.
Chelsey Kivland is an anthropologist who studies Haitians, which seems kind of racist if you think about it. These aren’t some lost tribe in the jungles of Borneo, but people who live on an island not far from the United States. In any case, some of her test subjects believe that a Smith & Wesson .38 special revolver carries a hex because three people who touched it died. These are people who believe in Voodoo, which according to Kivland is spelled “Vodou” and says it racist to spell it wrong.
Kivland thought about these Haitians believing this one particular gun being jinxed and ran with it:
Taking seriously the supernatural effects of guns has broad relevance for understanding and addressing gun violence globally. In the U.S., gun advocates tend to view the gun as a value-neutral tool. As they say: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” On the other side are gun control advocates who argue that guns do indeed kill people: Without their lethal power easily at hand, as in other countries, far fewer deaths occur. But the anthropological lesson from Haiti is that the truth is more complex. It isn’t just the technological lethality of guns that makes them dangerous: They also exert a power on human agency. They change us. It is both the technology and the symbolism of a gun that can encourage someone to shoot.
Even better, if you don’t believe her theory that guns make people into crazed killers, you’re a f*cking racist:
It would be shortsighted to dismiss these claims as the misguided logic of a “superstitious people.” That racially inflected trope, long used to marginalize and demonize Haitians, among others, blinds observers to the way in which guns do exhibit a power akin to magic: the power to create a change in someone’s state of mind.
See here’s the thing: magic isn’t real so things can’t possess magical properties. You’d think someone who went to college and got a degree in anthropology, which is more or less science, would understand that.
Those copper bracelets you see for sale on late night TV don’t magically cure you of your ailments, buying expensive golf clubs don’t magically turn shitty golfers into PGA pros, and guns don’t magically transform good people into bad people.
I have my own science to back this up: I first touched a firearm when I was 12-years-old and 38 years later (yeah, I’m old) I have yet to actually kill anyone. In fact I’ve never even pointed a gun at someone, joking or in self-defense. Since I first held a gun in my hand, I’ve gone on to amass a nice collection of firearms and fired probably over a hundred different weapons. If these things actually turned people into homicidal maniacs, it certainly would have happened to me by now. What are the chances that I managed to only come across the guns that aren’t magic?
The chances are exactly zero because there are hundreds of millions of non-magical firearms in private hands in this country that also haven’t created a nation of killers. People who do bad things with guns were bad to begin with and without a firearm would create mayhem and murder with something else. Just look at London where guns are banned: those crazy Brits are running around stabbing each other with sharpened potato peelers. Oh shit, maybe it’s the cutlery that has the magic.
Because liberals don’t just make up stupid crap for nothing, this anthropologist wants to use her “guns are magic” theory as the basis for gun control:
If we are to truly understand and control gun violence, we need to accept that guns have potent technological and psychological effects on people—effects that inspire violent ways of being and acting in the world.
Hey, this is actually kind of clever. The 2nd Amendment won’t allow infringements on gun ownership, but what if guns were actually magic? The Supreme Court hasn’t weighed in on magic, so maybe this is a path to liberals banning guns.
