Naomi Elana Zener wrote: Entitlement and Misogyny: Why Gun Violence Occurs. A few clarifications are in order:
We live in an era of entitlement. People feel entitled to have a certain level of wealth, grades, jobs, success, physical image, material consumer goods, and opinions, all handed to them on a silver platter. If you’re born into a life of privilege, it is your choice whether you help others less fortunate than you. Paying it forward is not something you have to do, while it may be nice if ultimately you do. There are many who work hard for their riches, physique, and accomplishments, but there are more who feel that they are owed these things. This perspective is one of entitlement.
Entitlement is a negative character trait, a flaw embedded in one’s psyche due to the value system instilled in them, primarily by how that person is raised and the environment in which they are raised. A sense of entitlement is further driven by jealousy. Not a day goes by where someone somewhere doesn’t say that they deserved something, or were owed something, simply because. The language of entitlement has emerged most prominently in the past 50 years, as people have become more inwardly focused.
A man is only entitled to what he produces or inherits, nothing more. This is NOT the philosophy of the liberals who think everyone is entitled to free education, free healthcare, and welfare from the cradle to the grave.
The number of shootings in the U.S. of late are rife with a myriad of complex issues, which include but are not limited to: lack of mental health awareness and the stigma that surrounds it; accessibility to guns; misogyny; gun control and the U.S. Second Amendment right to bear arms; and how wealth and privilege provides a foundation for someone with a vendetta to have the means to carry out vengeful, murderous acts
Typical Marxist, criminal shootings are not the result of privilege, the Cribs and the Bloods are certainly not privileged, yet they do most of the shootings.
Out of the recent UCSB shootings, one of the first voices that came forward in the aftermath was that of Joe the Plumber. Sarah Palin’s favourite lipstick wearing pig and the man of Main Street, who told anyone who’d publicize his sound bite in which he said “your dead kids don’t trump the constitutional rights.” That is a statement of entitlement. The unclogger of feces-plugged toilet drains, feels he is entitled to own guns. While the right to freedom of speech permits this person to share his sense of entitlement, it is equally my right to excoriate him for it. Unfortunately, the right to bear arms is one of those enshrined rights for Americans. It is this right, to which many like Joe, feel entitled that left unrestrained, results in terrible tragedies when guns fall into the wrong hands. Just like Joe is entitled to tote his guns, the UCSB shooter felt entitled to shoot anyone he felt entitled to blame for his problems.
So let’s me get this straight, it’s not right for us to feel entitled about our 2nd Amendment yet you are entitled by our 1st Amendment to excoriate Joe the Plumber? And enough about “when guns fall into the wrong hands.” What about speech that falls into the wrong ears? What about the young radical who reads “The Anarchist Cookbook” and decides to make a molotov cocktail? What about the unemployed man that decides to murder a few people because of something he read on a website? I defend the constitution regardless of the cost, Joe the Plumber is right, dead kids are not above the constitution.
The shooter felt that he was entitled to hate women. Innocent lives were massacred because a spoiled man of means, by way of family money, believed that he had the right to punish those whom he perceived to capture the essence of the life he envisioned for himself, but didn’t have. He, who came from a privileged, wealthy family (albeit one who has advised the world that they’d tried to do everything to stop him), felt that the world, and what he wanted from it, was owed to him. Specifically, that the women he desired, whom he found attractive, lusted after, and wanted to date or simply have sex with, should have fallen at his feet. He blamed these women for all of his problems, focusing his attention on their rejection of him as being what was wrong in his life.
I guess Naomi never saw the movie Monster,about real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a former prostitute who was executed in Florida in 2002 for killing six men in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The opposite of a misogynist is a misandrist, the word is so rarely use that my browser is showing it as a spelling mistake. Yet misandry is real, let’s talk about the feminists that want to ban Father’s Day, let’s discuss Title 9 which discriminates against popular male sports while demanding equal funding for unpopular female sports, or the radio commercials where the DJ claims “women rule the world” or how we have pink ribbons for breast cancer but nothing for colon cancer. Although to be fair, I don’t want to wear a brown ribbon or any ribbons for that matter.
Let’s be clear — in life, we are entitled to but one thing: our own lives. Apart from the air he breathed to help sustain his life, we are not entitled to anything else — no person, no shooter, is entitled to kill anyone.
I see, so if someone wants to murder me, I should just go ahead and let them do it. Is that what she wants? Are we not entitled to protect our lives from people that want to take them? Are cops and the secret service and the military not entitled to neutralize threats? What a load of crap.
The UCSB shooter was not entitled to even one glance in his direction from a member of the opposite sex. Perhaps if he was a kind person, a gentleman, someone who had attractive traits, a woman may have found him attractive. While it is possible that mental health issues skewed aspects of his sense of entitlement, having a mental illness doesn’t justify any sense of entitlement. The man who killed his ex-wife and her boyfriend was not entitled her love, or to any sense of vengeful retribution for having been dumped.
You’re right, the shooter had issues, as do plenty of other people, including Naomi who struggles with misandry. Most people with issues don’t commit any crimes, most people seeing a therapist, taking medication, going off their medication, don’t commit any crimes. Most people who feel entitled, don’t commit any crimes. As for being “a kind person, a gentlemen,” I assure you that there are plenty of nice nerds not getting laid.
No person has a right to lie to buy a gun for another person, making an already flawed gun ownership system in the United States even more difficult to track because the buyer wanted to give a relative the benefit of a better deal. This sense of entitlement in a person is what would either border or qualify as psychopathy. Psychopathy is not a mental defect from which one can be saved from a life sentence or a lethal injection upon being found guilty of murder. Psychopaths suffer from a special sense of entitlement, but nonetheless are held accountable for their crimes.
So wanting to save money is evidence of psychopathy? Call Suze Orman! Looks like there’s someone not putting People First, Then Money, Then Things. By the way, Naomi, suppose all guns could be tracked, what good does that do? Are you one of those smart guns advocates dreaming of a kill switch that renders all the guns inoperable? As for our gun ownership system being flawed, let’s talk about the billion Canadian dollars your brothers wasted on their flawed registration system? A system that didn’t even deliver the results expected and was ultimately eliminated. Let’s talk about Russia, a country with strict gun control yet one of those most violent in Europe, with lots of shootings, lots of black market guns.
At the end of the day, it’s up to each and every one of us to earn what we hope to achieve in life through hard work. No one is entitled to a certain job, home, car, piece of jewelry, friendship, or romantic partner. We are each entitled to breathe, live free from threat of physical harm or death regardless of gender, socio-economic status, religion, culture, creed, ethnicity, or sexuality. What transpired at UCSB, Seattle Pacific University, the shooting at Reynolds High School in Oregon, and in every other shooting was a violation of that one true entitlement because one monster took it away from people who had every right to have it protected, but were failed.
A liberal talking about hard work is laughable. Do liberals even like to work? Are they not living their lives jealous of millionaires and billionaires? Even jealous of whites and males for having imaginary privilege? And who the hell lives free from the threat of physical harm or death? Airlines are regulated and they still crash on occasion, driving is regulated and you’re more likely to die on the roads than on a plane, walking may seem like a safe activity until you get attacked by African killer bees.
Realists deal with threats objectively, if I’m afraid of violence, I get a gun. If I’m afraid of drowning, I wear a life vest. I fire is my concern, I get a sprinkler system. If I’m worried about being robbed when I’m not home, I sign for ADT. We are entitled to live free, but we’re not entitled to deny other people their freedoms. Naomi’s gun-free utopia will never truly be gun-free, will not be free from violence, rape, robbery, murder, assault, and all the crimes that happen in both free and unfree societies.
