Thank God For the Second Amendment
They're still collecting bodies in Virginia.
At least 20 people will not be coming home tonight. Instead, their parents or spouses will receive a concerned visit from the cops plus a counsellor. And from that time on, nothing will be the same.
They will have to read papers for months that talk about their sons' and daughters' deaths in the same measured tones in which the rise and fall of the Dow Jones is measured.
They'll have to watch television on which white men with guns continually and single-handedly become heroes--and never once torture or shoot innocent bystanders.
They'll spot graduation announcements in the paper--right next to their child's obituary ...
It's at times like these that I think that were I an American I would be grateful for the Second Amendment; that oft-quoted business about the right to bear arms.
Because that would mean that I could buy a large-calibre handgun and hollow-point teflon coated (teflon slides through bulletproof vests) "black talon" (opens up inside the "target" to tear his or her insides out) ammunition.
Which I would use on the first asshole to spout: "Guns don't kill people ... people kill people!" or "From my cold, dead fingers." A consummation devoutly to be wished.
I'd like to thank the NRA and the GOP for their staunch defence of the right of unstable, angry, small humans to expand their destructive range. There's a reason one rarely hears the phrase: "Workplace baseball-batting kills 29."
I'd like to thank the Bushies for making the world a darker, sicker, more violent place with their "culture of life" and their overweening imperial ambitions.
I'd like to thank them too, for ensuring that as the volcanic frustration of GW II vets builds up, this sort of thing may become even more likely.
Oh--and thanks ever so much, you damn dirty ape, for letting the assault weapons ban lapse, thereby increasing the firepower available to the garden variety nutjob.
~furious
Guns kill people. In the hands of the sort of small man who needs to own a gun so badly that he'll defend his right to own it even in the face of this sort of horror, they certainly do kill people.
God help the parents of Virginia now.
posted by Metro @ 11:57 am
9 Comments:
Bonjour M Metro
Well written - again we agree
I'm so sorry for the Victims & their Families
However, this is inevitable when the Americans are so irResponsible by allowing such easy & lavish access to guns
How many more of these Mass Murders have to take place before the Americans repent of their evil ways and introduce obviously necessary gun-controls
Your obedient servant etc
G E
Can't say I disagree with everything you say but with the laws the way they are, nothing is stopping criminals from going out and killing people.
It's tough for law abiding citizens to not want to protect themselves.
Life can be so cruel - and so short.
g eagle:
Many a true word spoken in anger and sorrow, I suppose.
I was wondering on my way home: who is crazy enough to take a stand for mass murder?
The wingutosphere will, I am certain, oblige.
Every time someone speaks out against gun control they speak in favour of this. The next crazy will have to raise the bar to get noticed.
Dan Savage points out that "ordinary" shootings don't even make the paper anymore. Even high-profile single shootings don't.
Rap artists exchange gunfire in crowded nightclubs and it makes page six.
Something is sorrowfully wrong with this picture.
Sorry Samuel:
That's exactly the sort of argument I was railing against. To say that innocent people need guns to defend themselves against criminals misrepresents the threat from criminals in the first place.
Besides, illegal guns don't just drop from Charlton Heston's lower colon. They don't go straight from the factory to the local Mara 18 warehouse to await distribution to street gangs. Almost all guns begin as legally acquired weapons.
Preventing people from acquiring them would be the first step.
Here's a challenge to the USA: Try it. Just for two decades. Have all citizens trade in their guns for ball bats or something.
If the murder rate doesn't drop like a rock, hell, open it all up again.
But no-one has the political will to try.
Unless there's some senator whose kids attend Virginia tech.
Bonjour M Metro
Je suis avec vous in cet argument
Jesus made an interesting observation on Anger, when he said that, if you (& I) are angry with your Neighbour, that is the moral equivalent of murdering him (or her, in these enlightened times of equal opportunity)
Mr Christopher has a powerful point, but only if so many "baddies" have guns - then we can understand why so many "goodies" might want to have guns in response
... but with so many guns in the USA, what about the inevitability of large numbers of "goodies" with guns becoming "baddies" themselves
What Husband/Father (even an Eagle ... or perhaps, all too often a certain Eagle, whom I know quite well) can pretend within the Family that he has never been wrongly angry with the Family
Introduce a family gun into this homely occasion and you could so easily convert a transient family argument into a life-transforming murder or two
The current US gun-culture is not merely an "unfortunate social behavioural manifestation" .... it is a wicked & sinful mistake
What is needed is repentance - the giving up of the wicked & murderous right to bear arms (implying a right to kill .... and be killed) and the removal & destruction of guns from being such a universal feature of US Culture
Your obedient servant etc
G Eagle
It fascinates me, M. Eagle, that George W. Bush, strict "constitutional constructionalist" that he claims to be, points to that debated clause (and it is hotly debated). He will not mess with it because he somehow believes that the Constitution is sacred and inviolable.
Yet he was perfectly prepared to mess with it in order to ban gay marriages.
The problem is that the Constitution was written in a very different era. It was a time when the frontier was half-a-mile outside of any major city; when real threats to the life and person of yourself and your family were omnipresent, included your neighbours, and there was no help of any kind--no organized police force and hardly any justice to speak of.
Only the most cynical of bastards could believe that that state of things still obtains.
The Second Amendment was written to enable the establishment and maintenance of a loyal fighting force of responsible citizen soldiers. But most households had a rifle as a means of putting game on the table in any case--so why not enshrine that "right" and make all armed men members of that defence force?
Sadly, most of the people most vociferously demanding their Second Amendment rights be inflicted on everyone else are not soldiers and hardly responsible.
And the shooter in this case, it turns out, wasn't even a citizen.
I calculate that today as I write (8 o'clock PST), some wingnut is complaining that what is needed isn't GUN control, it's IMMIGRATION control.
So it ever goes.
Bonsoir, M Metro
Encore vous avez raison, mon ami
On this occasion, it seems (apparently) to have been a South Korean
... but if so, we must remember that it could have been (& usually is) an American Citizen who carries out these atrocities - perhaps the South Korean had absorbed the American Civic Religion all too well
Meanwhile, the challenge is :
?? How can we persuade the "WingNuts" to think better on these things ??
Your obedient servant etc
G Eagle
And how can I occasionally tone down the terminology?
The word "wingnuts" has been flying around too much lately. Must find more convivial term ...
A teacher of mine once pointed out that a belief system is like a tree. The closer you strike to the root of that tree, the more violent the reaction will be in its defence.
In the US, some of the core issues are abortion, homosexuality, and of course, guns.
I don't know why guns are such a "roots" issue. Perhaps it's the cowboy mythos?
It would be interesting to watch the US implement sensible gun-control laws. Swiss or German for preference.
It lacks only the political will. Guns are a business base in the US and an arrow in the GOP quiver.
I would love to see the science on self-image/self awareness and handgun ownership. With penis size statistics thrown in for, a-hem, good measure, because I think the vast majority of people pushing the murder industry arguments are men, mostly white, and deeply insecure (like Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Tucker Carlson).
Mitt Romney recently flipped his gun control stance to cuddle up to "the base" (and the vile and the crass) ... wonder what he has to say this morning?
Virginia Tech was a "gun free zone." Banning laws only further tilts the power towards monsters like this Cho puke and away from law abiding citizens. If we had it your way, this would happen more often. We need the second amendment alive in schools too. One armed citizen could have saved dozens of lives yesterday.
@ap
If the US had gun control, we'd see more shootings like this?
Well I hate to tell you you're wrong ... No, no ... wait. Got that screwed up.
I'm quite happy to tell you you're wrong.
"One armed citizen ..."
I'd like to point out that what caused this carnage in the first place was one armed legal resident.
The Columbine shooters got their weapons legally. As far as I know so did Charles Roberts, and on and on we go.
So I fail to see how disabling the system that supplied their firepower would be a bad thing.
It's interesting that the "right-to-carry" crowd never seems to consider that those most prone to carrying guns are frequently those most likely to use them.
If this "no-gun zone" (and what a sad commentary that is on the state of the place, that they have to declare an area of a school that's supposed to be free from deadly weapons) had actually had no guns in it, nothing would have happened at all.
Under the "a gun in every pot" scheme, perhaps three or four people might have begun blasting away--this might have resulted in more deaths, or fewer.
But I'll tell you something. If everyone could carry a handgun, you wouldn't have a 30-person massacre in three hours. Instead you'd get 30 separate murders a year.
Supporting the "right" to carry deadly weapons is to buy into the idea that maniacs have a right to own them too.
Thanks for popping by.
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