Unprocessed Thoughts on Today's Events

There is a special place in hell for people who prey on children.

And there is a place right next to them for the people who make it easy to prey on children.  The aiders and abettors, the folks who can look directly at one catastrophic display of evil and say with a straight face, “the solution to the problem is to make such displays of evil even easier to achieve.”

Yes, I’m talking about the gun lobby.

The gun lobby has long ago stopped being about gun “rights.”  It stopped being about hunting and recreational shooting long before that.  And, pious protestations notwithstanding, it has never been about self-defense – nobody who has any actual knowledge about how guns are used takes such nonsense seriously.  Ask any trained professional – ask any cop or soldier (a real soldier, not some play-acting militiaboy) about that.  Only the wannabes and the couch potato heroes, deluded by video games and cheap beer, think that way.

And we all pay the price for that.

I study the Founding Fathers for a living.  I know what the Second Amendment was written to do.  And dammit, it wasn’t this. 

Not that the Supreme Court, in its infinite prostitution, understands that anymore – they overturned over two centuries of jurisprudence to give the gun pushers their Christmas list, a couple of years back.

Nor do many Americans understand it either.  The other day I got a post on my Facebook wall from a friend complaining that people who wanted to regulate guns were like people who wanted to regulate good drivers to punish all for the crimes of drunks.  Where do you start with something that stupid?  Where do you even begin to point out all the factual, logical, ethical, moral and historical failures of that statement?  The fact that we already regulate drivers?  The fact that deliberate premeditated murder is different from accidents?  Where?  It would take a stronger man than I and more whiskey than there is in the barrel even to scratch the surface of just how malevolently dimwitted that statement is, and how little respect that person had to have for me even to make such a statement where I would read it.

When Americans decide that they care more about their children than they do about their guns, things will change.  But not until then.  It’s as simple as that.

So today is just the latest massacre of the innocent, the latest occasion where some heavily armed waste of DNA decided to take out his shortcomings on other people’s children.  And there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, but already – already, before the blood has even cooled – the gun lobby and its sycophants are saying, “Hold on, don’t have this discussion now, let’s give it time,” because they know that in the end they will bury this one just like they buried the last one and just like those parents will bury their children, children who left for school this morning and won’t ever come back.

They will tell us, as they told us last time, and the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that, that the solution is to have more guns, so that more people can shoot into crowds of children, because somehow that will kill fewer people.  They will tell us that the problem wasn’t the guns but the shooter, as if the shooter could have murdered so many children so quickly any other way.  They will complain that any regulation on guns will inconvenience legal gun owners, because their inconvenience matters more than those children.  They will emit whatever fetid ooze they have to emit to divert attention from the fact that the objects of their fetishistic desires are the means by which the evil most often do their work.  They will distract the rest of us from working to keep that from happening again, because it is not in their interest to keep it from happening again.  They profit from fear, they profit from death, and they have no real desire to stop.

So they will laugh, all the way to the bank.  All the way to their comfortable little political think tanks.  All the way to their internet chat rooms and comment boards.  All the way to hell.

Fuck them.

Let them take their guns and shove them far up into the recesses of their lower intestines and pull the triggers, and let them find that special place in hell that they so richly deserve, right next to the guy who did the shooting today.

And let them rot there.