My Facebook page carries a daily running tally of the carnage caused by the pornographic proliferation of guns in America. It began more than a year ago with a story about a young child accidentally shooting himself to death, followed by a carbon-copy tragedy the very next day. I captioned the story of the second shooting by saying, “No, this is not a repeat from yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that, or the day before that, or the day before that…” I have had cause to use that same phrase – “…or the day before that…” – pretty much every day since.
On Saturday, a two-year-old girl in Fayetteville, North Carolina found a gun in her home. Seconds later, she was dead. The gun was loaded, the safety was off, and there was no lock on the trigger. No arrests have been made. No charges have been filed against the people who left a gun where a baby could find it.
On Monday, a twelve-year-old boy in Sparks, Nevada found a gun in his home. He took it to school and shot two classmates, and a teacher who tried to talk the gun out of his hand. The teacher died. The boy turned the gun he found in his home on himself, and died as well. No arrests have been made. No charges have been filed against the people who left a gun where a pre-teen could find it.
On Tuesday, a five-year-old boy in Orange County, Texas found a gun in his home, left on a table in the living room by a baby-sitter who took it out of her pocket before laying down for a nap. The baby-sitter awoke to a quiet house, went looking for the boy, and found him dead on the floor next to her gun. For a refreshing change of pace, the baby-sitter was actually arrested and charged with felony child endangerment. One is left to wonder, however, why the charge was not reckless homicide.
There are several other stories just like this, and the week is not over. One can only guess how many more parents will be pulling the ground over their children before the rest of the week is out.
Over the weekend, hundreds of gun-rights activists descended on the Alamo in Texas to lament how hard it is these days for gun-owners in America. The crowd was regaled by luminaries like Alex Jones, who dispensed his gibberish with the proud fervor of someone who has taken to heart the old adage, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” because he knows he’s getting paid no matter what he says. “If it’s a war they want,” he roared again and again as the day wore on, “it’s a war they’ll get.”
Maybe I am desensitized at this point, but after another week of stories about dead children, I find myself most bothered by this thing at the Alamo, for it represents the distilled essence of the ongoing, blood-sodden catastrophe that is this nation’s terminal fetish for guns in all forms. They really do think they are under siege, and see themselves standing post on the walls of their own fictional Alamo, facing down hordes of Obama-programmed FEMA soldiers who carry the banner of the UN and seek to take their guns before instituting Sharia Law across the land.
Under siege? It would be funny if it wasn’t so completely lethal. It is almost like a magic trick: a pack of dangerous, dim-witted blivets who drape themselves in camouflage and masturbate relentlessly to “Red Dawn” on a nightly basis sprawled on a pile of NRA leaflets while clutching an AR-15 in their other hand have figured out a way to become an untouchable class in American politics, even as the blood and brain matter of children swells past their ankles and up over their fatted calves.
It is, perhaps, the most remarkable trick ever turned in modern American politics. A few bottles of Tylenol are poisoned in 1982 and kill seven people, and the country erupts, and Tylenol is scourged from every shelf in the land, and new safety measures are swiftly enacted. More than three hundred million guns kill tens of thousands of people on a yearly basis, however, with gun and ammunition sales going through the roof every time a mass slaughter happens, and the nation barely twitches.
Somehow, these sad, sorry, pathetic, weak, soulless, gutless sacks of shame have not only insulated themselves and their deadly little hobby from the normal procedures of civilized society that take place when a mortal threat is exposed, but have giddily convinced themselves that they are, in fact, the real victims in all this. They can, and do, sell guns on Instagram and evade any and all background checks or other firearm laws, yet somehow they are being crushed under the bootheel of tyrannical governmental overreach.
Several weeks ago, two gun rights groups – The Second Amendment Foundation and The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms – scheduled an event called “Guns Save Lives Day” for December 14th, the one-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre that took the lives of twenty children, six school staff members, and the shooter himself. Last week, the organizers moved the event up a day to the 15th, so as to challenge anti-gun groups “not to hold political events in favor of gun control” on that sad anniversary, or something.
To be clear: they originally scheduled “Guns Save Lives Day” to fall on the anniversary of Sandy Hook, where 27 people died because of guns. The event, and the ghoulish timing of it, were noted in the press, and out there for all to see.
Nobody in Washington DC said a word.
That, right there, is power.
But the gun people are the victims, don’tcha know.
…or the day before that, or the day before that, or the day before that…
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