David Mamet, American Buffaloed

David Mamet has an article in Newsweek calling for a State with maximum guns.  He starts out quoting Karl Marx so you know where this is going.  And fast.  It is chock full of gems like this:

Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.

Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime.

I had forgotten how many cities of similar size as Chicago are in Texas, Florida, and Arizona.  D.C. is certainly an outlier, but if you actually look at gun deaths by state, you get pretty much exactly what you’d expect.  The States normally associated with gun right have the most gun deaths.

You should also read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “David Mamet and the Irrelevant Meaning of Actual Words” post.  It has gems such as this:

The message one derives from this is that power gives you the privilege of lying. If you are big enough, if your name rings out far enough, you may make words mean whatever you want them to mean. I experience this as a kind of violence against language. If we can’t agree on the meaning of “is,” then we have no ability to talk. And if we have no ability to talk, we really are that much closer to guns.

That is why I have a man-crush on him.  We, like David Mamet, are a people capable of massive intellectual laziness.  It’s no wonder so many of us think we need guns.