Earlier this week, we brought you the story of Carl Kemppainen, the O’Reilly Auto Parts employee who will be spending somewhere in between nine and 41 years in prison for having strangled a suspected shoplifter to death in the parking lot.
Now, we can’t know if Donald Trump heard about that one or not, but at a campaign stop in California, after telling the wealthy Republicans there that they all smell bad because of the water situation in the state, the former guy started going off about his plan to stop people “pillaging” stores.
Surprise, it involves murdering people in cold blood!
“We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he told the cheering dimwits. “Shot!”
“The word that they shoot you will get out within minutes and our nation, in one day, will be an entirely different place,” Trump added. “There must be retribution for theft and destruction and the ruination of our country.”
It’s like he just can’t help himself. I’m starting to think he actually kind of likes the idea of people loving him so much that they are willing to commit crimes and go to prison for him. It feeds his ego. It’s not the first time he’s done it — he’s encouraged his people to beat up protesters at his rallies and, you know, he also encouraged them to invade Congress in order to try to keep his Vice President from certifying the election. As of last month, over 1100 people had been charged in relation to January 6 and 662 had pleaded guilty.
On the other hand, he is a also master of telling people what they want to hear. The Right has been on a major vigilante jag lately — from songs celebrating lynching to the near-constant fantasies of taking down shoplifters by force. They’ve gotta flex their manliness somehow, and if that means gunning down a teenage girl swiping some lipgloss from Walgreens, then so be it.
Sure, they could get upset about the actual reasons behind the supposed increase in shoplifting — unaffordable increases to the cost of living and these stores cutting costs by not hiring enough people to work there — but that’s just not as immediately satisfying as homicide. That doesn’t make you feel like a cool Wild West guy.
To be clear, you cannot use deadly force on someone for stealing a loaf of bread, a tube of Maybelline Great Lash or even a 60-inch plasma screen television. Not legally, anyway. If you do that, you will go to prison, just like this other guy is going to prison, and you will have to spend the rest of your life knowing that you killed another human being over something so stupid.
Granted, if you are a Trump supporter, you may not actually care about that.
