I am sick and tired of listening to the gun nuts whine about their rights being more important than the lives of people’s children.
It’s one thing to say they have a right to own guns guaranteed by the Second Amendment, even though it was never seen as an absolute right until the last 40-50 years. It’s entirely another thing when you realize this so-called right is being used by the wackiest among us to build arsenals to protect themselves from the government.
During the five years I worked as a newspaper columnist in Southern California, there were several occasions in which I wrote about the gun nuts. One of those occasions was when I went to a gun show, actually the last gun show in Los Angeles County before such shows were banned by the state legislature.
It was 1998 or maybe ’99, and one of the first things I noticed was that someone was selling targets to be used for gun owners to practice their marksmanship. Not such a big deal in itself, except many of the targets were superimposed on pictures of the president and first lady.
You know, Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Then I saw an interesting weapon for sale. It was a long gun mounted on a tripod, useless for hunting or personal defense. Unless you considered the purpose of the gun. It was billed as a weapon that could be used to shoot at black helicopters if they were coming to take you away under the aegis of the United Nations.
I wrote about how ridiculous it was to believe there should be no limits on personal weaponry and asked why folks who felt that way wouldn’t think they had the right to own nuclear weapons. Maybe not ICBMs, but at least suitcase nukes. I said that if the government really wanted to take Joe Sixpack, he couldn’t stop them with his own arsenal.
I actually had one reader write to me saying that maybe Joe couldn’t hold them off by himself, but with his brother Henry Sixpack and their neighbor Bob Beergut helping, they could probably manage it.
Yeah, right.
One missile fired from a drone into Joe’s house and the Sixpacks are cancelling Christmas.
It isn’t privately owned weapons that stops the government.
It’s public opinion.
That was back around the time school shootings were just getting started. The Kip Kinkel kid in Oregon and the trench coat guys at Columbine in Colorado.
And that was really where it all went to hell. Once we realized that even murdered children couldn’t get the wackos to accept reasonable restrictions, America was finished in a very real way.
The shooting this week in Michigan was one of the most nightmarish of all in some ways. The kid was identified as a potential problem and his parents were called in for a conference at school. They talked, they left and within an hour or so the kid started shooting people with a gun he had brought to school that morning.
A gun his father had purchased four days earlier.
It’s tough to make assumptions, but apparently the parents’ role in this is significant enough that they are being charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
This at least seems to me to be a big step in the right direction. While some parents can be completely innocent in situations like this, the father apparently bragged to his son about what a great gun he had purchased and didn’t secure it away from the boy.
The fact is, the only way the true wackos can keep their support is to make outrageous claims. Marjorie Taylor Greene insists the Parkland shooting in Florida was faked, with actors playing the roles of those killed. Similar claims have been made about the shooting of elementary school children in Connecticut.
Sadly, the Second Amendment — along with abortion — are the two main ways the far right keeps its voters in line when the rest of their agenda benefits only the very wealthy.
They oppose even reasonable gun laws. What possible reasons are there for opposing background checks that would keep guns away from people who legally shouldn’t have them? Especially when all it means is that a legal purchaser might have to wait a couple of days to get a gun.
Dead children.
That ought to be worth a little inconvenience.
This used to be a helluva good country.