gun control

It’s Only A Matter Of Time

…and I can’t say it hasn’t happened. In fact, I rather think it may have.

Just over a year ago, I predicted a bloody spring. My premise was that we as a population produce a set percentage of people who go violently insane every year, and the crops from 2020 and 2021 had been festering under lockdown in their parent’s basements, just waiting for a new crowd to form so they could self-destruct in public as rampage shooters. Regrettably, that turned out to be the case, and it’s repeating again this spring.

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The Answer Is “Never”

Every time we have one of these highly-publicized mass-shooting events, or Heaven forfend another rampage killing, there’s always a sententious opinion piece on every news outlet asking “When will it end?”

And yes, the answer is “Never”. In Australia, a single event was enough to inspire the whole country to turn in their guns; New Zealand was similar. In the United States, we’ve had a dozen major shooting rampages, including in elementary schools, and public opinion is fiercely divided. It’s not too much of a stretch to conclude from this that the inevitable continued shootings will convince only scattered individuals while inspiring others to resist what they would term “government overreach”.

So let’s stop asking that particular question and move on to something a bit more proactive.

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This Was A Win

It’s been overshadowed by the Dobbs decision, but on Saturday the President signed into law a gun safety law that’s more than a compromise. Fifteen Republican Senators crossed the aisle to vote in favor of a package that closed long-standing holes in the laws and bridged several broad cracks that offenders fell through with regularity. It’s the first intelligent and targeted measure of this nature we’ve seen in years, and a sign that Congress can come together across party lines and act — at least, it can do so when it becomes evident that the general population demands it.

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The Militia: Well Regulated (Part 2)

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

2nd Amendment, US Constitution

It’s a simple enough statement, especially to have caused such pervasive disagreement in modern society. As with most such arguments, it has polarized past the point of debate, and now all that is left is attack and defense among the unreasoning without any consideration being paid to the actual meaning.

So let’s take a moment to discuss the meaning.

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Guns And Politics

Watching video of kids getting shot is traumatic. How could it not be? And who can watch that and not be furious — terrified — sickened?

So how can we possibly expect that our immediate reaction will fix a damned thing?

We don’t make good decisions when we’re upset; nobody does. Instead, we get angry; we kick and throw things; we cast blame everywhere. The universe hates us and everyone’s evil. And then, if we’re smart, we settle down and figure out what went wrong so we can stop it from happening again.

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I Don’t Know What To Do

There’s been yet another school rampage shooting, and I don’t know what to do except weep. Best I can tell, nobody else does either.

Oh, there’s a lot of noise and a ton of blame being thrown, and I’ve heard the phrase “common sense gun control” more times than I can count. It’s a meaningless string of words; if there were any effective way to stop rampage shooters with a simple, common sense approach, we’d have done it by now.

Whenever I say that, there are two responses:
– “Well, at least do something!”
and
– “Just ban guns! Ban them all!”

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Strange State

It’s highly unusual for a new president to address Congress within his first year, much less his first hundred days. With a near-deserted hall (thanks to COVID) in a fortified building surrounded by heavily armed riot police and not a few National Guardsmen, tonight’s address made history in several ways.

What wasn’t unusual was the content. Although it was delivered in an almost informal, folksy style, we heard exactly what we expected to. The tone was optimistic, and the message was clear: Biden laid out his agenda for the coming months, and he expects to make it happen. How, exactly, is another question entirely.

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Bloody Spring

Opinion

It’s happened again: We’ve had yet another mass shooting. Just between us, as more and more people start coming out of their year-long lockdowns, I predict we’re going to have a fair number more. We got a year off from them, but that just means we’ve had people become crazy at the normal rate… but they didn’t have obvious targets and so kept right on stewing in their basements.

Plus, every time there’s one of these shown on CNN, it seems other nuts see the television coverage and get inspired to do one of their own — as though being a copycat nut-job is somehow better than the first one, who might have been honestly acting out his own selfish frustrations on innocents rather than pretending to for the free press.

Don’t get me wrong: They’re both foul and almost inhumanly selfish. But the copycat is at least partly after the attention, which is worse — people’s lives are more valuable than that.

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Happy New Year. Now What?

We’ve survived 2020.

Hooray for us. So now what? What’s the new normal going to be?

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