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Sick of this Stuff that Happens.
Oct. 4th, 2015 05:40 pmFourteen years and a couple of weeks ago, eighteen madmen killed 3,000 people in three spectacular fireballs and a fizzled fourth attempt. Our nation changed within an hour. We were off to war, then off to another war, but we most successfully declared war on ourselves under the banner of Keep America Safe. We handed over our civil liberties, our privacy, and before long our shoes and belts if we wanted to get anywhere near an airplane or an important public place. We also ramped up something we've been doing to "others" since we got here 500-odd years ago and we were the "others"- judging them, demonizing them, and in extreme cases torturing and killing them.
Three presidential elections down and a fourth to go, and we have legitimate candidates for the nuclear football saying that we should seal our borders with Berlin Walls and make our neighbors pay for them. Or that No Muslim Need Apply to be president. I'll say one thing for their nuttiness: it's a consistent reaction, however overreactive, to the danger of terrorism encapsulated in those horrible moments of 3,000 sudden deaths.
There have been others since then. Four of them, deaths in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2012, have caused more controversy and Congressional action than just about anything that body has done in the years since. But that number pales, when compared to the true cause of danger in this country, alone among the advanced nations of the world.
One could argue that we've done a good job keeping those blue numbers down all these years. Or one could note that we do not have a National Terrorist Association that says "anathema" to any crackdown on the sources of terror, or that lobbies and scares elected officials into running away from any limitation on the right to kill.
I've never seen a bumper sticker saying "I'M A JIHADIST AND I VOTE." What I have seen are endless demands to REPEAL THE SAFE ACT within walking distance of this house, and in much greater numbers by going just a few miles to the north, south and east (only Canada prevents a full circumference). This was a state law passed in response to the Sandy Hook tragedy, which put a few limits on quantities and fewer on qualities of weapons. It's been hated, despised, challenged in court (unsuccessfully for the most part), used as a weapon against some who voted for it, and it stands as proof positive that the ammosexuals will not even discuss any "attack" on their beloved Second Amendment.
And that's the only "attack" they're going to survive, for if the Big Bad Government wanted them dead, they'd be outgunned with only the merest of drains on the battery of a drone. So the gun nuts instead arm themselves in rhetoric, and when that five-digit number for the year goes up by 10, or 20, or this time nine in Oregon last week, they say "too soon," or "lone wolf," or, as one soon to be former Presidential candidate said, "stuff happens."
I'm sick of it. I'm sick of being reduced to being asked to pray for the victims,because even our religious leaders concede there's nothing else we can do. I'm even sicker of the standard talking point response to calls for even the most modest of reforms- "dem criminals won't obey dem laws anyway, so yer just takin away OUR guns!" In theory, that's true. It's just as true that dem criminals can just as easily steal a car, but that doesn't stop us from putting locks on them, and requiring them to be registered and insured and trackable in the event of a crime, and we don't prevent the Centers for Disease Control from tracking the medical effects of vehicular injuries and deaths. The Congress of the United States has done just that in banning CDC research into gun fatalities.
It's a constitutional right!, they cry. Well, so is abortion. And as the quote I've seen today nails the link between the two:
How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion — mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he's about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because). Let's close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun.
It makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with women and health care, right? I mean, no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?
And likely the only reason that Brady Center supporters don't use the same tactic outside gun shops? Gun shops have guns and people stupid and angry enough to use them.
Three presidential elections down and a fourth to go, and we have legitimate candidates for the nuclear football saying that we should seal our borders with Berlin Walls and make our neighbors pay for them. Or that No Muslim Need Apply to be president. I'll say one thing for their nuttiness: it's a consistent reaction, however overreactive, to the danger of terrorism encapsulated in those horrible moments of 3,000 sudden deaths.
There have been others since then. Four of them, deaths in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2012, have caused more controversy and Congressional action than just about anything that body has done in the years since. But that number pales, when compared to the true cause of danger in this country, alone among the advanced nations of the world.
One could argue that we've done a good job keeping those blue numbers down all these years. Or one could note that we do not have a National Terrorist Association that says "anathema" to any crackdown on the sources of terror, or that lobbies and scares elected officials into running away from any limitation on the right to kill.
I've never seen a bumper sticker saying "I'M A JIHADIST AND I VOTE." What I have seen are endless demands to REPEAL THE SAFE ACT within walking distance of this house, and in much greater numbers by going just a few miles to the north, south and east (only Canada prevents a full circumference). This was a state law passed in response to the Sandy Hook tragedy, which put a few limits on quantities and fewer on qualities of weapons. It's been hated, despised, challenged in court (unsuccessfully for the most part), used as a weapon against some who voted for it, and it stands as proof positive that the ammosexuals will not even discuss any "attack" on their beloved Second Amendment.
And that's the only "attack" they're going to survive, for if the Big Bad Government wanted them dead, they'd be outgunned with only the merest of drains on the battery of a drone. So the gun nuts instead arm themselves in rhetoric, and when that five-digit number for the year goes up by 10, or 20, or this time nine in Oregon last week, they say "too soon," or "lone wolf," or, as one soon to be former Presidential candidate said, "stuff happens."
I'm sick of it. I'm sick of being reduced to being asked to pray for the victims,because even our religious leaders concede there's nothing else we can do. I'm even sicker of the standard talking point response to calls for even the most modest of reforms- "dem criminals won't obey dem laws anyway, so yer just takin away OUR guns!" In theory, that's true. It's just as true that dem criminals can just as easily steal a car, but that doesn't stop us from putting locks on them, and requiring them to be registered and insured and trackable in the event of a crime, and we don't prevent the Centers for Disease Control from tracking the medical effects of vehicular injuries and deaths. The Congress of the United States has done just that in banning CDC research into gun fatalities.
It's a constitutional right!, they cry. Well, so is abortion. And as the quote I've seen today nails the link between the two:
How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion — mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he's about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because). Let's close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun.
It makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with women and health care, right? I mean, no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?
And likely the only reason that Brady Center supporters don't use the same tactic outside gun shops? Gun shops have guns and people stupid and angry enough to use them.