Friday, February 03, 2012

Komen Foundation: "Shoot 'em Up!" [UPDATE]


Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast-cancer charity, doesn't want its name associated with Planned Parenthood anymore. (UPDATE #1: Or anyway, it didn't.) But it doesn't mind being associated with ... handguns.

Pink handguns.

Per Gawker, Komen has teamed up with an outfit called Discount Hand Guns to market a $429.00 weapon called the Walther P-22 Hope Edition. It's slide is coated in pink ceramic.

Can this be real? What sort of Freaky-Friday world-turned-upside down are we living in?

Okay. Deep breath. Let's be honest: Komen says it wants to give money directly to organizations that perform mammograms; this is a perfectly reasonable thing, given its mission. But ... but ... handguns? Do they know those things are designed to kill people? The same thing cancer does, but faster.

And, in the case of a .22, not much less horribly. Sure, it's a ladies' gun. But what happens when it gets stolen from the lady's nightstand or glove box? (And yes, that actually happened to a classmate of ours. Why she was carrying an unlicensed handgun in her glove box is a long story, which can be summed up in one sentence: She came from Florida.)

Street gangs like the .22 because it is usually a fired from a small, easily-concealed and comparatively cheap weapon. But it's a low-velocity bullet, often deflected by bone or stopped by muscle. In other words, it's not especially lethal. Except, that is, when fired at close range into the head, where the bullet lacks the energy to exit, and instead bounces around, and does awful, awful scrambled-egg damage to the brain. So in addition to gang-bangers, it is the preferred weapon of CIA assassins.

Our question, then, is not why Komen declines to support Planned Parenthood, but why it is willing to arm the West Side Kings and the guys who nailed Che.

[UPDATE #2: Susan G. Komen for the Cure denies any involvement with Discount Gun Sales, which in turn has taken down the web page that advertised the Hope Special. So is the real story here an unscrupulous gun dealer running some sort of fake-charity scam? Or is there more to it? Stay tuned for details!]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow-I thought it was a stereotype that the "progressives" thought of Che as a Jesus figure; now I'm even more amused by the PaxChristi/"Celebrating our Diversity" crowd. But the idea of a dermatologist, from a very privileged background, must have some fairly obvious resonance for Mainline Protestants, used as they are to a fairly privileged background but who also have delusions of relevance.

Father Anonymous said...

If you actually read this blog, you'd know that I'm a militant anticommunist, working to undo the spiritual and social damage done by forty years of communism in eastern Europe. The reference to Che (a) was (a) a joke, and (b) had nothing to do with Jesus anyway.

And on the subject of delusions of relevance ... well, dude, look how you waste your time, eating Chee-tos in your mother's basement and reading my blog.

Anonymous said...

1. My parents are dead. 2. I'm not in the basement 3. I hate Cheetoes. I do like communion wafers-especially pre-consecrated ones. You know, the ones somebody did the hocus pocus on. And you can always tell the difference-there's a red light glowing outside the magic ones.