Absurdity
Conservative Think Tank Declares Gun Violence a 'Natural Price of Freedom'
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The American Liberty Policy Council released a major new report Thursday concluding that gun violence is not a public health crisis but rather, in the organization's preferred language, 'the natural and expected price of living in the freest nation on Earth,' and that Americans should feel grateful the cost is not higher.
The report, titled 'Liberty Has a Premium: Reframing Gun Violence as a Feature of Constitutional Society,' runs 74 pages, not counting the index, a six-page appendix of pre-written condolence letters for local officials, and a glossary in which 'grief' is defined as 'a form of spontaneous civic participation.'
'We are simply being honest about the transaction,' said Dr. Garrett Folwell, the Council's Senior Fellow for Constitutional Economics, in a statement released alongside the report. 'Every free society has operating costs. Ours happen to be itemized.'
The report recommends that the federal government stop classifying gun deaths under public health statistics and begin reporting them instead under a new category called 'Liberty Expenditures,' which Dr. Folwell described in the press conference as 'more accurate and, frankly, more dignified.'
He then took no questions.
The Council's methodology divides gun deaths into three tiers. Tier One, which the report calls 'The Cost of Access,' covers incidents involving legally purchased firearms. Tier Two, 'The Cost of Proximity,' covers bystanders. Tier Three, 'Collateral Liberty,' covers children, and is accompanied by a footnote explaining that the category name 'is not intended to minimize the tragedy but rather to contextualize it within a broader philosophical framework,' which, in the report's own footnote to the footnote, is described as 'ongoing.'
The report has drawn criticism from several directions, including from Senator Diane Holcomb of Wisconsin, who called it 'the most elaborately formatted piece of moral cowardice I have encountered in eleven years of public service, and I sat on the Senate Finance Committee for four of them.'
The Council pushed back, noting that Senator Holcomb's office had not read the full 74 pages, only the executive summary, the appendix and the glossary. Dr. Folwell told reporters by email that the report's full argument 'cannot be fairly evaluated without engaging with Chapter Six, which is about elasticity.'
Chapter Six is about elasticity.
The condolence letter appendix, which has drawn its own separate commentary, offers officials a tiered selection based on the size of the incident and the proximity to an election cycle. The 'Expedient' template, rated at the lowest sincerity level, reads in its entirety: 'Our thoughts are with the community during this difficult period of liberty expression. We remain committed to the values that make moments like these possible.'
The 'Heartfelt' template is three sentences long and includes the word 'unimaginable,' which the glossary defines as 'occurring with sufficient regularity to require a pre-written response.'
The report also notes, in a section titled 'Comparative Freedom Costs,' that other rights carry similar hidden expenditures. Free speech, the authors argue, costs society an estimated 'several billion dollars annually in therapy, broken friendships, and comment section moderation,' and yet nobody is proposing we ban that.
This comparison appears on page 41. On page 42, the report argues against jaywalking decriminalization on the grounds that 'a society without consequences is a society without order.'
No one at the Council has acknowledged this yet.
Funding for the report was provided by the Council's general operating budget, three anonymous donors, and a grant from something called the Foundation for Responsible Liberty, whose website has one page and no contact form.
The report closes with a call for 'national resilience, personal responsibility, and a measured acceptance of the terms under which freedom is delivered,' and thanks readers for their 'continued investment in the American experiment.'
The American experiment was not available for comment, but its lawyers have been notified.
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