As often as I am wont to say that I hate the living, I don’t think the answer is locking the doors and shooting everyone else.

And as much as I’m a Yellow Dog strict constitutionalist, and all, I think that the intent of the founders regarding the 2nd amendment had more to do with protection of the citizenry in the face of no standing national army and less about the right to bear arms for the hell of it, or the day the silicon chip inside your head gets switched to overload.

For the POTUS to deliver some mealy-mouthed inanity like he did: “Oh, jeez, everyone should have the right to bear arms, but they should obey the law”* just makes me want to vomit.

You know what? In this day and age, there is no need for the average citizen to own a handgun. Or an assault rifle. Or any other small arms. And if you want to, then join the fucking military and go defend us from the world.

Or how about this? You can own all the guns you want, but you can’t own the ammunition. Or how about the British model, and the guns are locked up in gun clubs and the only time you get to play with your toys is when you are out with other killers hunters shooting at animals. And not like here, where there are hunting farms, where the animals are penned until you get there to kill them. That would be the kind of hunting done by that masterful asswipe, the Vice President of the United States, who shot 400 quail and his hunting companion. There were 500 quail released that day. Oh, I made the numbers up, so sue me, I can’t remember everything I read. But he did go out shooting live skeet, and he did shoot his buddy, so do the numbers really matter?

But no. This is America, land of the freely stupid and bravely stubborn in the face of all logic. How many more? How many more people will be shot for no reason by people with no reasoning but plenty of guns and ammunition? When will the neo-cons and NRA apologists figure out that guns don’t kill people, but people with guns do?

To quote the Rude Pundit, have you ever heard of a drive-by stabbing?

A long, long time ago I dated a man who used to dream about killing his ex-girlfriend. Not in an abstract way, but vivid and explicit dreams about shooting her in the head.** (No, I didn’t date him long after I heard about that, and when he wanted to see me suddenly after a year or so had passed, I would only meet him in a public place.) A therapist told me that we all dream about or can dream about killing people, but that only a person capable of doing it in real life could see it all in that kind of detail. But that was twenty-some years ago, before hyper-real FX in movies, and first-person shooter games on every PC and GameBoy and Wii.

We have not become, as our Moron-in-Chief says, a culture of life, America has become a culture of glorified violence. It is approved by our government when we dance around the definitions of torture re: the Geneva Conventions. It is approved by our government when we out-source our prisons to folks without the same delicacy of nature that America pretends, as a nation, to have.

How many more students will be shot down? How many more innocent folks, putting gas in their cars? How many children caught in the cross fire of gang wars? How many more gallons of blood will paint the hands of the NRA and their spineless puppets in Congress before we decide that maybe, just maybe, in the 21st century, in this place, we all don’t need to have a sidearm strapped on?

I hate the living, but that doesn’t mean I want to kill them.

* Especially since the POTUS and his entire administration seem unable to obey any laws theirownselves. You know, the little ones, like perjury, and destroying evidence, and doctoring evidence, and leading this country into an illegal war, and wiretapping, and illegal search and seizure, and spying on US citizens, and you know, the whole rest of the ten commandments and most of the US constitution.


** That boyfriend? Killed himself. I was never able to find out how, but there were hints… he’d watched Blue Velvet a hundred times, it involved massive amounts of drugs and, yes, a gun.