Syndicated columnist Marc Munroe Dion: Guns, drugs and a nation killing itself

America is killing itself, and the means we have chosen to complete our suicide are guns and drugs. End of story. Tell the editor it's ready for print.

All right. A little more. I promised the editor around 600 words, and I'll get close to that number no matter how many 9-year-olds die while I'm writing.

But keep that "America wants to die" concept in the back of your mind while you read. It will help you understand, and it will keep you from attending a candlelight vigil. During the remaining nine months of 2023, America will have more candlelight vigils than it will professional baseball games, the only difference being that people think baseball is important.

The most recent shooter got six in Nashville, a small but sincere addition to America's gun-to-our-own-head century. That same shooter was identified as female at birth, but most recently used the pronouns "he/him" to identify.

This is good. Since 2009, just a tad over 1% of all mass shooters have been people who have swapped pronouns.

If what we're doing is committing national suicide, then all the triggers can't be pulled by straight white men. That's like not letting a girl play on the high school football team. It's America. Everyone gets to do some killing.

So, bravo, brave transgender! You're as good as the natural born, swinging pronoun men.

And let's get this whole thing really figured out. Let's find out which groups are underrepresented in the American carnival of dead kids. Get the stats out there, and if Asians or Samoan Americans or drag queens aren't doing enough killing, get 'em some free guns. This has to be a really national effort, one that crosses all boundaries.

We're already doing well on the death-by-drugs side of the ledger. People of all colors, faiths, genders and socioeconomic classes are overdosing. It's a little worse in the poor neighborhoods, but so is everything else.

We don't really give a damn about politics or race or gender, not really.

What we want is more death. Endless death. Overdosing on the floor of the McDonald's bathroom. Bleeding like a stuck hog on the floor of a grocery store. Ripped nearly headless in a classroom where there are pictures of Easter bunnies on the wall.

Tennessee has almost no gun laws, and they are one of the standard bearers for equality. You wanna buy a gun? Tennessee's got your back.

During my childhood, in the days of American bigotry, some tobacco-chewing gun shop owner might have taken a look at that Tennessee Transgender and said, "Kid, you look like a freak to me. I'm not selling you anything."

But that was before, back when drugs were sold in bad neighborhoods, before the country had a commitment to killing itself, and not one person at a time either.

We're way past that now, and guns are as available as drugs, and drugs are as available as table salt. No matter what your gender or sexual inclination, Tennessee will sell you a half-dozen guns or so, and you can clean them in between working on your "manifesto."

Yeah. I told the editor 600 words, and I'm nearly there, thank God. Don't call this a newspaper column, and please don't call it a manifesto. Call it the suicide note for an entire country. Cock the gun and in that little "click," hear the equality of death.

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