Cracked: Letters of Marque are Scary!

Yes,  Cracked has an article about 5 Crazy Scenarios You Didn't Know the Constitution Allows

It's a funny list,  given there's fretting over  a "dictatorship loophole",  which no one is sure how it would work, other than maybe the shocker that constitutional amendments can amend the whole of the constitution and thus can do any dictatorial thing, including change how the Constitution is amended...

Fretting over Texas being able to split up, that the President can devolve his powers to the VP,  and that people can still be put into slavery and bondage if it's "punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."  Which given the vast, vast number of people incarcerated in the US, shouldn't be a surprise.

But the one that tickled my fancy was the "The Constitution Could Make Us All Pirates".  That is freaking out about the Letters of Marque part.  (As a side note, it's a bit funny as some Cracked writers would go all fanboy about pirate hunting).

Which goes to what made me amused.  See this is Adam Wears' work.    Right, the same guy who is stating in this article that the Founders Intended to be able to give average citizens the power to hunt pirates, with actual warships,  thinks the Founders never wanted average citizens to have firearms.  And thinks this to the level that it was NRA insanity that got the idea of an individual right tricking the courts.

Cracked: Fake News Makes people Afraid of Mass and School Shootings

That is David Wong Cracked's Executive Editor's assertion in this list.

"13 Myths About Society Too Many People Believe"

Specifically:

6) Myth: School Shootings Are Rampant

7) Myth: Mass Shootings Are A Significant Danger To The Average Person

And he does a calm rational way to show that yeah these myths are false.
And he's saying this as someone who would happily ban these guns.

I do have to wonder how he squares this with Adam Wears  the frequent, and bilious, anti-gun writer he has on staff.

Ah well. Does show that for all the time Cracked goes against pearl-clutching moral panics in the media, they're quite guilty of it too.

Also Wong takes apart a few other sacred cows so the article does read like one of those older Cracked pieces where one has to wonder if this is being subversive or not.

Looks like I missed one...

So turns out Cracked had another gun article about a month ago.

And turns out that this and the last two articles were all written by the same  Adam Wears.


Behold 6 Psychotic Gun Accessories (You Can Totally Buy)  which is an interesting mix of silly and more silly things.

Through it all Wears' tone is extremely angry  and literally ends with an unrelated "Even Australia recognized we needed gun control after their own horrifying massacre. Read about it here."

And that last link is a book about the massacre... not the laws passed after it.

What's interesting is the "even"  as if Wears is surprised that Australia passed gun control. Given Cracked has repeatedly pointed to they want Australia's gun confiscation to be done in the US.

The funny part is that despite Wears preening about how "We at Cracked have dedicated a lot of words to debunking the myths that popular culture loves to spread about guns"  his number one scary item? 

Tripods.  Seriously, the number one in the list is the evils of gun tripods.  Only a bit into does he get into "crank-fire" guns.


I am amused that the article opens with the expected "Gun owners are just beardo man-children obsessed with merch and pop culture" you know...  what Cracked used to jokingly, but lovingly, call their "core audience" Wears goes on about "when a gun nut spends too long on eBay."

One wonders if Wears really thinks that the things he listed can be bought on Ebay....

It took them almost couple months....

But Cracked once again is beating the Anti NRA drum.


Now there's "6 Underreported Reasons Why The NRA Are Just The Worst"

Three things off the bat.  Note the the extremely clickbait formatting of the headline, even by Cracked standards  then note that the verb is conjugated for plural.  Meaning that it's not "the NRA" as being the worse,   but "NRA members" as being the worse.

And finally... under reported?    Reading the list of pear-clutching and conspiracy mongering the list is all stories that are pretty well known.

I'm just amused that Silencers (#1) are both somehow so effective that they're prefect assassin devices, but also so ineffective that they're pointless in reducing hearing damage.

And that when Smith and Wesson is pressured by the goverment to go into Smart Gun technology that's perfectly fine, but when gun owners decide to no longer by their guns  then it's suddenly an affront to the free market.

As a minor note, it is amusing that in some cracked articles Waco and Ruby Ridge are signs that the goverment is reckless and crazy and abusive of power,  and in other articles those events are legitimate and questioning them is just conspiracy mongering.  But since Cracked had their big editorial and contributor cull earlier this year, they probably can't do checks for consistent editorial stance.

 That said, I'm a bit surprised Cracked took them this long to write another article.

Small Business Bites End.

And we come to the conclusion.

Though there's room for a sequel, but, more importantly, there's always revisons.