Yaaaay it's a new year, we get to write 2013 on our papers now. Alright, well, it was also Christmas too, and so this post is kind of Christmas-y I guess. See, my neighbors across the street have this fantastic lights and inflatable Christmas display, and they also play the best music! It's so wonderful (that was all sarcasm)! But their displays bring up some questions. See, I mentioned that they have Christmas inflatables (they have inflatables for every season). And they're also really into hunting. Sooo.....

I know it's really blurry, but that right there is a snowman with a gun. Also Santa in what I am told is a deer blind. Santa also has a gun, and he's joined in his cheery deer blind by a penguin, and there's a deer down below who looks really terrified (it has bugged out eyed. Santa's seems pretty happy though, and the snowman is smiling). It used to be just the snowman, but they got the deer blind Santa this year. Whenever anyone drives by their house, they slow down and stare because why wouldn't you (some neighborhood gossip: apparently the guy once had a dead deer hanging up in his back yard and it was dripping blooood, because I guess that's what you do to dead deer)?

Anyway, (that was an introduction) I thought I would write about this because it's a freedom of speech issue. Where I live, it's pretty liberal, and these Christmas inflatables seem offensive to us. I mean, Santa Claus is going hunting. And yet we're granted the freedom of speech in the Constitution, and we've come to interpret that as everything but hate speech. But then what's hate speech? Usually, in the law at least, it's defined as any form of words that incite violence or prejudicial actions. So in that context, deer blind Santa doesn't seem like hate speech. Maybe if he were actually killing the deer, and there were blood and guts and stuff. But deer blind Santa is kind of sweet looking and cartoony, and so is the shooting snowman (who isn't actually shooting that's just what we call him). So it seems kind of weird and offensive to my liberal sensibilities, but it's really not that bad.

Of course, I had planned to write this before Sandy Hook happened. After that having happened, it seems a lot worse. The neighbors have had them up since long before the shooting, and haven't taken them down yet. I still don't think it qualifies as hate speech, since it wasn't in retaliation to the shootings, and it doesn't really have anything to do with the shooting beside the guns. Seeing as I had basically written everything before the shootings, but this post deals with guns, I wanted to make sure I addressed if anything changed after the Sandy Hook shootings.