The National Rifle Association’s conference in Houston, Texas, would be considered by many to be “ill-timed” given it’s a gun rights conference occurring directly after the mass shooting of 19 innocent children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, but it’s not. Truth is, the NRA did not have anything to do with this shooting. Regardless of your feelings about them, in free states, it is frowned upon to impose a crime upon innocent persons.
Popular podcaster Ethan Klein of the “H3” podcast is one such person who believes that this is somehow the fault of the NRA, or that the organization has some part in the blame. Klein and others who share his belief believe that standing up for gun rights is as guilty of the shooting victim through enablement.
It’s a very shallow take. A lot of failures went into creating this mass shooting, but gun laws weren’t one of them. The main factors were a lack of mental health resources and failure to enforce the law, as well as bad plans for schools in order to protect themselves from school shootings. This problem could have been solved if more guns were available to those who are able to defend themselves. These shootings were not supported or encouraged by the NRA. You might as well blame the Food Network for America’s obesity rates.
Klein seems, as many others, unable to discern between legal, responsible, knowledgeable gun ownership, and mass-shooters who disregard all that. Klein suggested bombing the NRA conference in Houston.
He quickly walked it back, then continued to make more and more jokes about how everyone in that building should be “killed with kindness.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w1Dh1HYjTg
Klein suggested it and YouTube banned YouTube for nine days.
Klein, and those who remain in his ever-dwindling fanbase, have tried to write this off as a joke, but let’s be clear…he wasn’t joking. What Klein said was a moment where he wasn’t thinking and he was a lot more honest than he intended to be.
If Klein had immediately walked that back and made it clear that he doesn’t want innocents to get hurt, apologized for his words, and then moved on then I would have a bit more sympathy for him. People say and do dumb things in moments of passion that they don’t really mean all the time. It doesn’t make it right, but at least Klein would have exhibited self-awareness and humility at that moment.
Instead, he hid behind qualifiers and scenarios it was clear he didn’t mean. The joke is that he thought people would buy that it’s a joke.
Conservatives got triggered over jokes I told & mass reported me. My episode was removed and I was expelled from Facebook for a week.
If only they cared about dead kids as much as they do jokes…
So I wanna say sorry. Sorry y’all are such pathetic snowflakes. Fuck the NRA & fuck Abbott🖕
— Ethan Klein (@h3h3productions) May 29, 2022
— Ethan Klein (@h3h3productions) May 29, 2022
Klein displays a lot stupidity. Klein seems completely ignorant about the conservative view on this. Ever since the shooting, conservatives have been demanding changes but they’re hardly acknowledged because they don’t involve supporting goals that can’t be accomplished such as making the AR-15 disappear or buckling down on more gun restrictions that will do nothing to stop gun crime.
Furthermore, if I said “I want to kill every single person at the DNC” and then quickly said “just kidding, I want to bomb them with love” or I said “let’s kill every single one of those mother f***ers with kindness in Minecraft” as Klein did, then there wouldn’t be an end to the people making it clear that I was just using those qualifiers as phrases to protect me from legal trouble or crossing social media’s TOS.
Klein is quite clear about his style. Klein has made his pattern quite clear.
He wouldn’t be acknowledging it as a “joke” and he knows it.
Klein won’t get that treatment. While I don’t think Klein would be psychotic enough to bomb or shoot anyone, it’s not a thing one goes around suggesting because there are people out there that would, and they’ve done it.
I’ve always been the first guy to stand up and defend edgy humor, and I don’t ever want to get worked up over things that are just jokes, but it was clearly not a joke. Klein attempted to pretend it was one but it wasn’t halfheartedly.
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