DUFF McKAGAN Talks Poltical Climate And Gun Control In New Column – "I Don't Claim A Party Because They Are All Mostly Assholes At This Point"

Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan is now penning a column for Noisey dubbed HEY! Did Ya See This…. Following is an excerpt from the inaugural installment featuring McKagan offering his thought on the current political climate in the US, in particular the issue of gun control.

McKagan: “The political climate right now is beyond embarrassing for any of us who actually study political and social issues of yore. For instance, when President Obama came out with his announcement of trying to procure background checks for online sales and at gun shows, I was slightly stunned that this practice hadn’t been in use since the, uh, the advent of modern-day gun sales. But after this announcement, American TV media went absolutely wild.

I received texts from two friends (one a cop, the other an Alaskan crab fisher). The texts said the same thing, and they both came on the day Obama made that announcement on TV (I was actually at home in front of television listening to the words he said). Both texts read “Obama is taking away our guns and the 2nd Amendment.” Er, well, actually…NO. There was nothing in what he said in that announcement that was challenging ANY amendment to the Constitution, nor did he say anything about some new-formed posse that was going to storm Americans’ houses and …take their guns.

I did answer my friends’ texts. I said simply ‘Huh?’

On CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC, things are presented to us as truths just because one person is yelling louder than the other, really, and rhetoric is presented at a fourth-grade level….because guess what America…that’s how dumb or uneducated they think we are. This Republican/Democratic schism is so rank and divisive; I’m just not sure how any of us could pick one party or the other. I think I used to be a Democrat, but some Republican ideas work great too, and Socialism too, has done great things for the financial safety nets of this country. If we could just scrape up and pool all of the good ideas that work….that’d be my new party allegiance. No, I don’t claim a party, because they are all mostly assholes at this point.

From traveling around and meeting so many people as much as I have over the last 30 years, I just know that we, as a nation, are way above all of this crap. We are WAY smarter than this, right?”

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