Guns

Did you notice that yesterday news of a shooting in Missouri went nearly unnoticed.  Just another shooting.  Eight dead, including the shooter.  Just another mass killing.  Our country has become desensitized to the murder of its citizens.  Guns have taken the place of discourse in settling issues because guns are omnipresent in this allegedly civilized society.  American society is heading in the wrong direction. 

On the day that Leonard Nimoy passed away, it is painfully obvious that Gene Roddenberry's vision in Star Trek of a future where the people of Earth finally are at peace and work peacefully with other civilizations out there in the universe, including Mr. Spock's Vulcan world, is never going to happen when we here in the United States are showing the advanced countries of the world that we cannot even manage our own serious issues.  Guns, racism, political inaction, a financial disconnect between the one percent and all of the rest of us so great that it boggles the mind ... all of these things and many more from the country that many of us thought could lead the way.  Maybe we should step aside and allow some other country to take the lead on these things.  Exceptional?  Maybe once, but not now.  We cannot get to that amazing place that Roddenberry hoped we could if we continue to do nothing to enhance civilization. 

More guns will lead us back to the Old West when everyone had guns.  That was not a good time in our history, despite any romanticized idea that it was.  That was a time when people truly did settle their differences with their guns, men being "called out" by other men, and worse.  The Lincoln County War here in New Mexico is proof of how bad things could get.  Look it up.   

There is a line from the 1998-2000 TV series The Magnificent Seven that is so apropos to what is going on in this country today.  The former notorious gunslinger and now-lawman Chris Larabee tells a young Chinese man whose father and uncle were both murdered, who both admires and fears what he sees in Larabee and wants to learn to shoot in order to take revenge on the evil man who ordered the deaths of Chinese workers on the railroad: "Guns and hate.  It's a bad mix."  How are we in the year 2015 not able to see that for the truth it is and take action to reign in this ongoing domestic terror?  More guns brings more lawlessness.  Fewer guns brings you far closer to domestic tranquility that our founders wrote so eloquently about. 

The very hard work of removing guns as an option for use in any dispute needs to happen.  It requires strength and bravery and fortitude from our elected officials, but that means that we, the citizens of this country, need to make it clear at the ballot box that the future of our country is important, that we think it important to safeguard our citizens from killings due to hate or due to happenstance.  Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a terrible statement of where we stand on guns today in this country.  That children can get hold of a gun and shoot their cousin or sister or mother or themselves and these events be deemed "accidents" shouts to the rest of the world that we do not value human life the way we say we do.  Talk is cheap.  We need action, and we need it now.

Guns

http://news.yahoo.com/police-body-found-us-park-gunman-224005459.html

You see, this guy should never have been able to keep his guns. Apparently a whole lot of people knew he was unstable. But because so many stupid people in this country don't get that the 2nd amendment to the constitution - including the idiots on the Supreme Court - was intended to allow freedom to bear arms for a 'militia' (that's a group, not an individual...in other words, the police or mili...tary), and not this guy, he was able to shoot people earlier in the day, and kill this, by all reports, lovely person. I know the paranoid in this country think they have to own a gun to be safe, but this is a complete fallacy. This woman was armed, but she wasn't given a chance because this crazy man was running wild with high-powered weaponry. The citizens of this country, and that includes former members of the military, do not need nor should they have weapons that have only one intent: to kill people. You need a rifle to go hunting and, in a nominally sporting way, shoot a deer, fine. But you don't need fifteen varieties of that weapon...one will do. Or do what my dad did: use a bow and arrow, which is far more sporting. This country needs to start acting like a civilized country and pass laws that will prevent innocents from being victims.

Oh, and I really could give two shits that this guy is a veteran. He should never have been allowed near weapons, and I will eat my nice black cowboy hat if we don't hear right quick about all the failures in the system that allowed this nutjob to become a menace to society. It really is a shame that his delusions didn't just result in his suicide. I have nothing but compassion for the men and women who have suffered in battle and come back changed by what they saw. But the Veterans Administration has excellent resources to help these people, and there is little doubt that the vast majority of them who are diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder manage to get enough help that they don't go off and start shooting people.

I refuse to show this asshole's picture. Rather, I leave you with a photo of Margaret Anderson, his victim. Someone who loved her husband and her children and the beauty of this country in her intense love of her job as a national park service employee. Such a shame.