NEWTOWN AND AFTER

Expansion of a comment I left on Lisa’s Women On blog entry.

Where to start? Say anything about Newtown or Aurora or Clackamas or... and you'll get Chicago and Detroit thrown in your face, usually with insulting adjectives added. Apparently we can’t take care of all the other guns until the gangbangers are dealt with.

 Ask how many guns anybody needs and you get the same treatment. Point out that hey I’ve got relatives that hunt, eat what they shoot and keep the guns and ammo safely stored the rest of the time which is fine by me. And you’ll still find you’re being accused of being some liberal, commie, socialist that wants to disarm all the good law abiding citizens.

Including one twit that thought it was really cute to post a picture of herself, the baby and whatever kind of semi automatic pistol the family owned. Kid was treating the gun like it was a pacifier. Almost, I don’t think the kids mouth was big enough to actually suck on the barrel. I mean how twisted is that? And mummy had a thousand watt smile going. “Aren’t we just so cute?” Actually, no. And I hope I don’t read about your kid a few years down the road after he’s accidentally wounded/killed the cat, the dog, a neighbor, another kid, you or him/herself. Although most of the time it does seem to be a male of the species that’s involved in these cases. Anybody out there hear of any little girls getting involved in these cases?

Oh, and don’t even try to point out that in most cases cops go through at least some training that gives them a snowballs chance in hell of actually hitting what they're aiming at, and in too many cases they still miss by a country mile. There have been stories out of NYC where the cops fired multiple rounds and only managed to hit the “suspect” a couple of times. So where did all the other bullets go? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

I've never bothered to point out that the nightmare scenarios of the American Gestapo "coming for our guns" are just exactly that. Fever dreams. There's an appalling inability among too many people to start at point A and work their way through to say G. The government would have to bring back every person in uniform, militarize the police departments, declare martial law with a twenty four hour curfew and hit every neighborhood at once, And that’s assuming that the troops detailed to seize the guns don’t tell their commanders to stuff it and refuse to obey orders.

I made the comment once that I was for anybody having all the guns they want as long as they were what was available when the constitution was written. Kind of hard to hold a massacre when you have to stop and go through the whole flintlock reloading routine. And you'd be kind of obvious trying to haul in a small trailer load of loaded long rifles or even single shot pistols. THAT went over like a lead balloon.

The kindest commenter called me an idiot. It got depressingly interesting from there. In some cases the commenters actually threatened me after calling me a, well you get the picture. And that may be part of the root of the problem. There's a cancer of violence in the American psyche that shrugs at first person shooter video games and goes into hysterics by a millisecond long view of a woman's nipple on an otherwise almost fully clothed body.

Remember Janet Jackson’s wardrobe “malfunction” a few years ago. Folks swore up and down they actually saw a nipple. Hey, I looked at the video too and all I saw was a blur. It sure wasn’t long enough to scar anyone. Unless they were already scarred.

And how in the name of all that’s holy and several things that aren't do we cure that?

Although given the breakdown between men and women committing the crimes, maybe we should just mark any gun bans "men only" and be done with it.