My email to the National Rifle Association
G’day National Rifle Association,
I’m writing to you because I feel a great injustice is being perpetrated against you by my compatriots.
You see, I live in Australia. As you now well know, in 1996 the Prime Minister of Australia responded to a massacre in which a man murdered 35 people using semi-automatic weapons by implementing the National Firearms Agreement, which broadly restricted citizens’ use of a particular range of guns. As you also know, whenever someone goes on a gun rampage in the United States, people begin to discuss gun control and point to Australia as a radiant example of the good that can come of a government depriving the public of a right to bear certain arms.
Indeed, most Australians are extremely proud of the fact our country hasn’t had a case of gun-related multiple murder since the Agreement was introduced. Some Australians even mock the United States, and your organisation particularly, for your intransigent attitude and your preoccupation with the Second Amendment to your Constitution.
They use appalling terms like “psychotically and sickeningly deranged loons”, “miscreant black-hats of yesteryear”, “exemplars of deluded God-fearing America”, “pump action degenerates”, “constitutional terrorists and derelicts who use propaganda to hold a country hostage via a corrupt political system”, “trigger-happy shit pouches”, “powder-stick clutching codgers”, “belligerent dickbiscuits”, “arsey cunt-wibbles”, “a mass indistinguishable from the contents of a one year old’s nappy after consumption of half a kilo of sultanas”, “toxic, turgid cloacas of the apocalypse”, “suburban frontiersmen open carrying in McDonalds”, “anal swabs from the last leper in hell”, “obdurate brittledicks”, “a group of self-proclaimed realists obsessed with an imaginary deity and 220 year-old laws”, “antiquated redcoat-fighting wannabes”, “hooting, honking sociopaths”, “gun rooting fanatics”, “a giant group of old men grasping at their last vestiges of virility”, “shamelessly insensitive arse spores”, “the dregs of humanity, hiding their sexual repression behind camouflage and standard issue goatees”, “the rotting barnacles of humanity”, “shitcunts” and so on and so forth. None of which, of course, is true.
They gloat. They ridicule you. They laugh at you.
But not for much longer.
Now that North Korea has the bomb, as you know, thermonuclear war is inevitable. Of course, nuclear war is an oxymoron. There is no war. There are just two people on either sides of the world flicking launch switches, one after the other, followed by the end of civilisation as we know it.
We know this thanks to science. But scientists, as you know, are often shifty and their forecasting outrageously exaggerated. We can be sure, however, that they aren’t employing hyperbole in this case thanks to a much more dependable source of information and prognostication: computer games. Namely the Fallout series.
I recently spent 90 consecutive hours playing Fallout 4. I know you probably did too. The game, as you know, tells us much about what we can expect after the Communists bring about armageddon.
Following the apocalypse, there is no government – nice.
But there is also no order – fuck.
Chaos reigns like a dim-witted monarch. (I hope that metaphor works for you. I know it’s been a very long time since you had to deal with an extremely unintelligent leader in your country.) There is no electricity, which means no electric fences. There are also no cages, no zoos, no gated communities. So animals, formerly-incarcerated humans and undesirables roam free.
So do weird mutant creatures, by-products of the radiation that saturates the air, water and earth.
Hastily-assembled militia rove these badlands – nice.
But they don’t have a government to fight, so they just go around killing people for no reason – fuck.
(It seems highly unlikely to me that a paramilitary civilian army would become drunk on power and go on murderous sprees, but it’s in the game, so it’s probably legit.)
In short, it’s just a massive cluster fuck. Humanity, sub-humanity and walking goo things all flung into the same squared circle of survival and left to go at it like wrestlers in a post-apocalyptic Royal Rumble.
So that’s the lie of the smouldering land in this imminent, inexorable future.
How will you guys cope in America?
Absolutely fine.
If Fallout has taught me one thing, it’s that nothing turns a baddie’s head into mush like a semiautomatic weapon. Not a flaming samurai sword. Not an electrified sledgehammer. Not a railway spike fired out of a steampunk missile launcher. And, thanks to the Second Amendment, you have semiautomatic weapons in abundance.
Yes, you’ll be fine.
But we – we Australians… well we’re knackered, aren’t we? We gave all our guns back to the government.
Of course, we’ll have supercharged skeletal cars and incredibly sexy makeshift leather body armour and a residual sense of gun-free superiority, but what good will that do us when a horde of koala-human hybrid mutants attacks us in the wee small ours of the morning while we camp by a glowing billabong? The dread creatures will ravage us. Because, as you know, the only thing that can stop a bad koalaguy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
My fellow Australians gloat. We ridicule. We laugh.
But who’ll be laughing tomorrow when the war begins? And ends? And we’re not packing heat even though there are giant bipedal marsupials trying to eat us and kill us and make love to us and shit?
The answer is you. Or would be if there was still any feasible link between our two nations post-technological oblivion.
Anyway, as you know, discussing guns is a stimulating business and all this talk of killing things with semiautomatic weapons has given me a considerable erection. It’s time for me to make 27 amendments to the contents of my seminiferous tubules, if you catch my drift.
Yours in a shared love of freedom (to pierce people’s skulls with small bits of metal if the need arises),
Jonathan Rivett
Read more Haught emails
…or choose one that takes your fancy from the list below:
My email to Facebook
My email to Microsoft
My email to Yarra Trams
My email to Metro Trains
My email to Coles
My (unsent) email to the Victorian Department of Transport
My email to Alan Jones
My email to Kyle Sandilands
My email to Gasp Jeans
My email to Jim Beam
My email to Ben Polis
My email to Hoo haa Bar
My email to Weis ice creams
My email to some tobacco companies
My email to Margaret Court
My email to KFC
*hours*
good article, thank you