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News, notes, and observations from the James River Valley in northern South Dakota with special attention to reviewing the performance of the media--old and new. E-Mail to MinneKota@gmail.com

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Ho hum, 20 grade school kids, 6 teachers. Can we top that next week?

And the retard chorus sings its loudest.

Twenty children of 6 and 7 years were gunned down.  As were six adult school personnel.  And those solid citizens immediately start shrieking and whining that someone is going to take their guns away, and insist that such incidents would not happen if everyone in society was armed.  One can only marvel at the decency of it all. America shows its true values.   Guns over kids.  It's our heritage.  It's our culture. It's America at its most exceptional.

 Some folks might think it perverse that a bunch of people react to the slaughter of twenty 6 and 7 year-olds by being obsessively concerned that to some people it might indicate a need for some kind of gun control.   Why should anyone be concerned about the lives and well-being of children when we must live against the threat that someone might pass legislation regarding the sensible use of firearms?  Those doubters just are not good Americans.  They simply do not understand what a great privilege it is to live in a country that is so exceptional that it has a mass slaughter at a school, a movie theater, or a shopping mall every few weeks or so.  You can't get that level of entertainment anywhere else in the world.  

The gun nut ward has turned to literary figures to justify their concern.  They like to put up a quotation from beat novelist and drug addict William Burroughs as a justification.  He said:  "After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."

He is a person who must be respected as an authority on the responsible use of guns.  A gun nut himself, he and his wife developed a game they called  "William Tell" in which he put a glass on her head and would shoot it off.  One night in Mexico City, where he was waiting for the statute of limitations to run out on a possible drug charge in Louisiana, at a drunken party he and his wife played William Tell and Burroughs missed and shot her in the head.  After 13 days in jail, his family got him out on bail and eventually he left the country, which sentenced him for murder in absentia.  Burroughs is the sage we really want to listen to when it comes to guns.

However, in another quotation, which the NRA-minds can't seem to grasp, Burroughs said, "The gun contol people attribute all the murders to the fact that people can get guns; but of course murderers can use other instruments. And then the riflemen scream that gun control is disarming the citizen, as if that were a factor anymore. Do they think they are back in the minutemen days, or that we need an army of citizens armed with sporting rifles? I think it's an irrelevant idea from both sides."


This was all said before we had assault rifles and their toy-store versions, which was used by the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  But, nevermind.



This latest incident could give a huge boost to the conservative movement in America.  It demonstrates the weakness of our public schools.  Now they could be privatized and turned into for-profit shooting galleries so the gun crowd could have a place to put its values on show.


I must put my disclaimer in at this point.  I am a gun owner.  My collection, some of which is inherited, includes shotguns, rifles, and a couple of black powder muskets with worn-out bores from shooting in Civil War re-enactment contests.  I have no problems with guns.  I have problems with some of the people who worship them.  

When I was a soldier, the Army practiced gun control.  When we were not using  our  weapons for training, or guard mounts,  or parades, or exercises,  they had to be turned in and locked up.  Every weapon and piece of ammunition had to be accounted for.  The officers and cadre would not dismiss the troops to go about other business until every piece was cleaned and turned in to the armory.

Now such strictures on when and where one can carry firearms is said to be a violation of the Second Amendment.

There used to be a saying about never giving a  baby a gun.  Now the commandment is let every baby carry a gun wherever the baby wants.   

The human race is not getting any smarter.  It is getting infantile.  The infants are influencing pubic policy and insist that the right to bear arms trumps the right of 6 and 7 year-olds to have lives.  

We are exceptional.        
 

3 comments:

John said...

Thoughtful piece offered for the consideration of you and your readers as our thoughtless, soulless mainstream corporate media make heroes from zeros. It is beyond me why the media receives a higher popularity or acceptance rating than does congress since both work to the detriment of our republic.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/josephgrenny/2012/12/13/the-media-is-an-accomplice-in-public-shootings-a-call-for-a-stephen-king-law/

David Newquist said...

The article you cite makes many valid points, but for some reason it does not address the major factor in the way these shooting stories are reported. For three days, CNN and MSNBC, among others, have constantly broadcast from the shooting site, repeating over and over details about the shooting. The cable networks get huge audience ratings in this coverage and strain to fill 24 hours with coverage. But just as they did with Columbine, they got the facts wrong at first. They identified the mother as a teacher at the school, they got the identity of the shooter wrong, they got the kinds of weapons used wrong, and they place all the emphasis on the sensational. Audience ratings, which mean money, are behind this kind of coverage. But it only serves to inflame the already disturbed and gives them ideas about how to express their festering mentalities. They are also missing the aspect that this age of cable news and social media plays a big role in the exclusions and consignment to ignominy that gives these people their motives.

Eve Fisher said...

Absolutely true. And currently everyone is hopping on the "mentally ill" bandwagon, ignoring the fact that it was his mother who bought, legally, all those weapons, that Bushmaster and Glock, etc. The availability of assault weapons - something with no other purpose than to kill human beings - is what is insane.

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