Say it ain't so, Joe

It’s time once again for The Future American’s FAIL OF THE WEEK! Every Saturday, I name a person or group who has spent the past seven days behaving in a particularly idiotic way. Since it’s my belief that idiocy knows no politics, nobody is safe.

This week’s fail was brought to you by – God, it hurts my teeth to type this – congressional candidate Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (R-OH), who many of you are probably very ashamed to remember as Joe the Plumber. He’s currently challenging Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), with whom I disagree on several issues but is still enormously preferable to her previous post-redistricting primary challenger, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). But at least those do wouldn’t get this as wrong as Joe did.

In a new campaign ad, a grinning Joe (I refuse to call him by his last name) express pride in his country’s individual gun rights. That’s fine with me. I wish I had some. But he went off the rails with this bit:

From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others, unable to defend themselves, were exterminated.

Now I’m not going to pretend that this didn’t happen – it did. But it didn’t happen in a method that you could stuff into a campaign video. The Holocaust isn’t as simple as 13 million citizens losing their gun rights and being wiped out. They also lost property rights, employment rights, educational rights, cultural and religious rights, privacy rights, political rights and, ultimately, the right to life. And it happened in an extraordinarily calculated, systematic manner that no gun would have helped.

For Joe to use the Holocaust to underscore a point about gun control is not only deeply offensive – and unnecessary; who’s really talking about guns these days? – it’s also deeply ignorant. If you want to put this into modern perspective, let us consider Syria. Individual gun rights, for Arabs at least, were intact before the uprising and remain so to this day. Are they helping? Not when you’re dealing with a well-regulated militia that won’t protect you, with all of its tanks and much more destructive artillery. That’s what you get when you feel the need to revolt against your government.

Individual gun rights are better for protecting your family and property than they are for protecting your nation, and you don’t have much chance of protecting your family and property against a pro-regime firing squad in America. If Joe wants to extol the virtues of gun rights, he would frame it that way. Otherwise he’s insulting Americans by spewing out some statistics and calling it a good point. And nobody’s “whining” about this, Joe. We just don’t like morons.