Credit: Pixabay
I woke up to a New York Times headline on Tuesday, October 3: No Easy Answers After Las Vegas.
Yes, there are.
Let’s not sell automatic rifles to anyone who goes to a gun show or a gun shop. F**k ’em. Let them manufacture their own, like the moonshiners during Prohibition did. Then they can strut and have movies and serials that can make them feel like they won the Civil War.
Maybe they’d even be arrested for possession of killing machinery.
While we’re at it, let’s not sell guns to kids. If a kid has a gun, it should be confiscated — no questions asked, unless the police want to know how he got the gun. Watch out Daddy (and Mommy), you might be thrown in jail, too.
Let’s not sell clips with heavy or light loads that feed their lead poison into altered assault rifles firing two rounds a second … you know, like those weapons that thrilled patriots watching Japanese fighters in our propaganda movies from the late ’40s.
Las Vegas, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Columbine were not movies, by the way. There were no uglified Japanese actors in those videos. Those were dead people, many of them kids.
Has anyone noticed that the National Rifle Association has been ducking and covering the last few years? It’s because they’ve become so successful at buying politicians and defeating controls of deadly machinery that they no longer need manly explanations of why I should be able to have an assault rifle.
“The total of contributions to candidates by the National Rifle Association [Political Action Committees] and its affiliates is 51 times larger than contributions from individuals,” and “14 out of 35 National Rifle Association lobbyists in 2015-2016 have previously held government jobs,” says Open Secrets.
Open Secrets. It’s the online site of The Center for Responsive Politics, which even the New York Times frequently defines as liberal. That reminds me: the NRA and the Deep South States don’t want me to have an assault rifle because, after all, I’m a damn liberal too. I could have one only if I were part of the Deep South States.
In the days after massacres, our less than courageous national leaders will offer condolences, will say they’re praying for the victims’ families. They’re not praying; they’re offering a “warm condolence” to mothers and fathers and friends of the dead. They’re wasting time blathering about decency. They should instead simply say they’re sorry for what they’ve done.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the spokeswoman for our absent-minded President, choked up while reading — reading — her words of condolence for families and praise for first responders who came to the aid of the dying in Las Vegas. So what? Who on earth doesn’t feel, at the very least, sad about massacres?
I do care when Sanders, in her sovereignty, berates reporters for asking if legislated gun control isn’t a necessity. Now is not the time, she answered. We have to be sorry.
Politicians like Huckabee Sanders, most of them Republicans, are complicit in these massacres.
We peddle war to kids. I have a teacher friend who says he knows two boys who received war video games directly from the US Army.
Now is the time to deal with this national wave of forgetfulness, this intimidation by gun wavers like the next U.S. Senator from the great state of Alabama, this obscene rapture over long-distance violence, which will soon leave a bloody corpse in your street or walkway or school breezeway.
Then you’ll remember.
Again.
Bob Dorn
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Bullets should be heavily taxed. We can call it the “Cost of Freedom Tax”. You may have the right to bear arms, but where does it say you can have magazine clips and bullets? Every box of ammo should be wrapped in images of what a six year old looks like with his brains blown out or his body riddled with bullets.
The right to bear arms is conditional. The second amendment grants that right to a “well-regulated militia.” Not many bozos in giant pick-up trucks would consent to being well-regulated by the government. Somehow this condition does not get a whole lot of attention from the NRA. Next thing we’ll have reported on The Nightly Blues will be a story about the NRA wanting to edit out “well-regulated.”
Keeping guns out of kids hands is a good idea. But let’s do it if we’re going to do it. We send teenagers to war. As young as 17. All you need is your loving parents to sign for you and off you go into our perpetual war machine. It is how we devalue our youth. If we send teenagers to war, why shouldn’t they have guns ? I’m sure that the NRA has thought of this.
Wellllll… other nations send people to war at a young age and when they come home they find those weapons are illegal in the civilian sector. Check out the gun laws in England and France and Italy and the Scandinavian states, where annual gun deaths don’t exceed 100.
Sorry for the lame attempt at humor.
The NRA is now pushing for the ‘right’ to carry guns in bars, college campuses, and day care centers…and to think the Carthagenians were once condemned for sacrificing children to their insatiable gods.
Some states already allow that already. I mentioned this before but I even know a couple women in my neighborhood (Hillcrest/North Park) that started carrying firearms with them everywhere (including bars) in response to the increase in sexual assaults. The legality and possible consequences are completely off their concern radar. Scary times.