Yesterday I received an email from a company in California offering to send me a brand new knife which, according to the message, is the best and most reliable weapon I will ever need to protect me from all kinds of harm.  And the knife is free!  I just have to pay a small shipping charge and I get this awesome, personal-defense product as my very own.

              Where did the company get my email address?  From Armslist, the internet gun Craigslist, where thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people try to sell their guns. I have been a Craigslist member since the website first started up and have actually both bought and sold several guns on the site.  Don’t worry, they were all legal sales.  But knives are different from guns – as lethal as a knife may be, most jurisdictions don’t require any kind of licensing at all.

What struck me about the knife giveaway, however, was the ad which then appeared on my computer monitor after I placed my order for the ‘fight fast’ knife.  Because for the paltry price of just $129, which is a lot less than what I would pay for the latest Michael Jordan Retro 13 sneaker, I can get an Extreme Survival Package, an essential set of tools to keep me and my family alive when “the real horror and chaos of an actual meltdown sinks in, you’ll suddenly realize you’ve been thrown back into the stone age.”

What this survival package allows you to do is “cross even rugged terrain with total confidence,” then “construct a temporary hide site,” also “keep your team protected from infiltrators,” and most important, get “alerted in advance” if someone has “infiltrated your territory.”  And all of this for the ridiculously low price of $129!!

Let me just interject a point of reality here, which is that I have always wanted to get the franchise for renting those electric chairs which people ride around in at the NRA show. Because most of the folks who rent those automated walking-machines don’t have some kind of physical infirmity with their legs – they are simply too fat to walk anywhere under their own steam. No matter how many pounds you need to lose, if you want to feel really thin, just go to a gun show and wander around, looking at the people, not just the guns. And these are the folks that the ‘fight fast’ knife company believes need to negotiate ‘rugged’ terrain?

Back in the 1980’s, when the gun industry first realized that most sporting hunters were either dead or now living in suburbs or simply too old to hunt, they cocked up the idea that a gun was still an essential piece of equipment because, sooner or later, everyone would meet up with a bad guy who would attack hem unless they were armed.  The latest version of that nonsense comes from idiot Dana Loesch (no surprise) who claims that an assault-rifle ban is just another attempt to prevent women from protecting themselves in instances of domestic abuse.  God only knows how Dana actually spouts such crap with a straight face.

I am beginning to believe that the ‘armed citizen’ marketing of guns is morphing into a new message which combines the threat of criminality with the coming breakdown of civilization, an apocalypse  that can only be prevented if we take necessary measures to keep ourselves and our loved ones protected from harm.

It turns out that a healthy majority of Americans now believe, according to Pew Research, that more than 80% of American senior citizens believe that video gaming contributes to gun violence. Meanwhile, more than 40% of American adults play shooting games, and many of these games revolve around various survivalist themes.

What’s the difference between cranking up the video console to play Frostpunk and buying an essential, Fightfast survival kit?  The video game only costs ten bucks but every marketer will tell you there’s nothing more American than selling up.

Thanks to Shaun Dakin for mentioning the video survey on Pew.