— That crazy-ass bastard in Colorado.
— Which crazy-ass bastard in Colorado?
— The crazy-ass bastard that shot all those people in the supermarket.
— The one last week? Or has there been a new crazy-ass bastard shooting people in supermarket?
— The one last week. A supermarket, for fuck’s sake. People there just buying bread and tunafish and shit. Now they dead.
— Dead as tunafish.
— I’m thinking about buying me a gun.
— You’re what?
— I mean, you can’t buy tunafish without some crazy-ass bastard shooting you? Fuck that. I’m a get me a gun.
— There it is, right there.
— There what is?
— That’s how they do it. That’s how they keep selling guns.
— They who?
— Motherfuckers who make the guns, that’s who. Look, how many people we got in America?
— Fuck if I know.
— About three hundred and thirty million.
— That’s a lot of people.
— A metric shit ton of people. And how many guns we got?
— Fuck if I know.
— About four hundred million.
— That’s a lot of…wait. We got more guns than we got people?
— We got more guns than people. That’s what people call market saturation.
— Market what?
— Saturation. Like if you selling tunafish and everybody already got a whole damn shelf filled with cans of tunafish, don’t nobody need any more tunafish, right? So how you gonna sell ’em more tunafish?
— Fuck if I know.
— You got to scare ’em.
— How you gonna scare people into buying tunafish?
— You tell ’em tunafish gonna save their lives. You tell ’em tunafish’ll cure cancer and hemorrhoids and mumps. You tell ’em unless they got a stack of tunafish in their cupboard, they gonna get the Covid. You convince folks they absolutely GOT to have tunafish if they want to live.
— But…
— Or you tell ’em that tunafish gonna become scarce. They don’t stock up on tunafish right fucking now, it’ll soon be gone. They’ll never get any more tunafish. Hell, the government probably gonna come right into their kitchen and take whatever tunafish they got.
— That’s bullshit.
— Course it’s bullshit. Don’t matter. Scared people fall for bullshit like they was made of brick. Truth is, if you got yourself a couple of cans of tunafish, you don’t need to buy any more until you ate up what you got. Right?
— I guess. I sorta forgot what we were talking about. Wait…market thingy.
— Market saturation. Same as tunafish. You already got yourself a gun…or even two or three guns…the only way the motherfuckers who make guns are gonna sell more is if they scare you into buying ’em.
— You’re saying gun makers had that crazy-ass bastard shoot up that store in order to get people to buy more guns?
— What? No. Jesus, no. What I’m saying is the motherfuckers who make guns will use gun violence to scare folks into buying more guns. It’s like this. If you make guns, you want to make it easy for folks to buy guns. If you make it easy to buy guns, some crazy-ass bastard will buy one and use it to shoot folks shopping for tuna-fish. And every time some crazy-ass bastard shoots a lot of tunafish-buying folks, the motherfuckers who make guns will say, ‘The only way to protect yourself from crazy-ass bastards who buy our guns is to buy more of our guns.’
— Maybe they should make it harder for crazy-ass bastards to buy guns.
— See, there’s the problem. You mostly can’t tell if a crazy-ass bastard IS a crazy-ass bastard until he starts shooting people.
— So what do we do?
— Make it harder for everybody to buy guns.
— But I want to buy a gun.
— To protect yourself when you need to replenish your tunafish supply.
— Well, yeah.
— Because it’s too easy for crazy-ass bastards to buy guns.
— Exactly.
— There it is, right there.