guns

A Brief History of the United States of America,

Michael Moore, 2002

Transcript

“Now it’s time for a brief history of the United States of America. Hi, boys and girls, ready to get started?

Once upon a time, there were these people in Europe called pilgrims and they were afraid of being persecuted. So they all got a boat and sailed to the New World where they wouldn’t have to be scared ever again.

“Oh! I’m so relaxed!”

“I feel so much safer!”

But as soon as they arrived, they were greeted by savages and they got scared all over again. “Oh! Indians!” So, they killed them all.

Now, you’d think wiping out a whole race of people would calm’em down. But no! Instead they started getting frightened of each other.

“Witch! Witch!”

So ooh they burned witches.

In 1775 they started killing the British so they could be free… and it worked! But they still didn’t feel safe.

So they passed a second amendment which said every white man could keep his gun.

“I love my gun, loves my gun.”

Which brings us to the genius idea of slavery.

You see, boys and girls, the white people back then were also afraid of doing any work, so they went to Africa, kidnapped thousands of Black people, brought them back to America and forced them to work very hard for no money and I don’t mean no money like “I work at Walmart and make no money”, I mean zero dollars, nothing, nada, zip; doing it that way made the USA the richest country in the world. So, did having all that money and free help calm the white people down? No way, they got even more afraid. That’s because after 200 years of slavery, the black people now outnumbered the white people in many parts of the South. Well, you can pretty much guess what came next. The slaves started rebellion. There were hundreds of them running after their masters, their heads got chopped off.

When the white people heard this, they were freaking out and going “Oh! No way! I want to live. Don’t kill me, big Black man!”

Well, just in the nick of time came Samuel Colt who in 1836 invented the first weapon ever that could be fired over and over without having to reload. And all of a sudden, whites were like “yee-ah!”. But it was too late, the North had won the Civil War and the slaves were free. Yep, they were free now to go chop all of the masters’heads off and everybody was like “Oh no! We’re gonna die!” But the freed slaves took no revenge, they just wanted to live in peace, but ya couldn’t convince the white people of this, so they formed the Ku Klux Klan and in 1871, the same year the Klan became an illegal terrorist organization, another group was founded, the National Rifle Association. Soon, politicians passed one of the first gun laws, making it illegal for any black person to own it. It was a great year for America: the KKK and the NRA.

Of course they had nothing to do with each other and it was just a coincidence: one group legally promoted responsible gun ownership and the other group shot and lynched black people.

That’s the way it was all the way to 1955 when a black woman broke the law by refusing to move to the back of a bus. White people just couldn’t believe it:

“Why won’t she move?”

“What’s going on?”

“Man, all hell broke loose”

Black people everywhere started demanding their rights and white people had a major freak and fear downtown and they were all like: “Run away! Run away!”

And they did it, they all ran fleeing to the suburbs where it was all white and safe and clean and they went out and bought a quarter of a billion guns and put locks on doors, alarms in houses, and gates round the neighborhoods. And finally they were all safe and secure and snug as a bug.

And everyone lived happily ever after.”

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