I always thought we were reasonably lucky that Osama bin Laden got the 9/11 attacks wrong.
“What?” you ask. “He brought down the Twin Towers and damaged the Pentagon. How did he get it wrong?”
Seriously?
Absolutely. Bin Laden brought down symbols of American business and of our military. He didn’t even do that much damage to his second target. He attacked New York and Washington, two of the most logical targets. Americans could easily have decided that as long as they stayed away from New York and Washington, no problem.
But what if he had attacked the Popcorn Museum in Holland, Ohio?
What if Al Qaeda had flown a plane directly into the museum on a busy weekend day? I’d be willing to bet not one person in Holland, Ohio, would have imagined that terrorists might someday come to town.
Or maybe even more shocking, what if the terrorists had flown a plane into the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota? It is a real place, you know. Not just a goofy song by Weird Al Yankovic.
If those had been the target, the death toll would have been lower and the destruction of property smaller, but the psychological effect on Americans would have been greater and longer lasting.
People in small towns from East Anus, Alabama, to Tickle Me, Idaho, would have worried at least some of the time that terrorists might pick their home town as their next target.
The national anxiety level would have always been orange or even red.
Enter Boulder, Colorado, and its King Soopers supermarket, where a lone gunman murdered 10 people yesterday.
If there has been one advantage to shutdowns during the pandemic, it’s that there have been far fewer shootings. But with right-wingers pushing for reopening everything, losers with guns have decided it’s open season again. There have been seven mass shootings in the last seven days.
These aren’t restaurants or gay bars or Las Vegas casinos. These aren’t shootings where the holier-than-thou crowd can say it was the victims’ own fault for being there.
It was a freaking grocery story.
I lived in Colorado for two years, less than an hour to the northeast of Boulder. I shopped at King Sooper’s.
I completely agree with the survivor who went into the Boulder market to buy a cold drink. “I just wanted a soda,” he said. “I didn’t realized I might have to die for it.”
When will it stop? When will people scream “ENOUGH!” and do something about guns?
As much as I hate to say it, it’s not going to happen. The NRA and the gun nuts are the best example we have of the tail wagging the dog, of a minority oppressing the majority. I was stunned to see a graphic of what percentage of people in each state are gun owners.
Stunned because even in the gun-nuttiest states, such as the one where I lived, the number is usually less than one-third.
One-third of the people, at least possibly the angriest one-third, is preventing the rest of us from protecting ourselves from them unless we become like them.
Until 1968, the right to control the ownership of guns with background checks, registration and licensing wasn’t questioned even by the NRA. Chief Justice Warren Burger — a conservative — said a year later that any right to absolute gun ownership of all kinds of weapons was a myth.
Republican President Richard Nixon called guns an abomination and suggested that reasonable gun ownership would be allowing people to own long runs with licenses and to ban handguns completely.
What changed in the late ’60s? A different sort of people started purchasing guns to protect themselves.
African-Americans.
All of a sudden, American rednecks needed more guns and better ones.
In the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan demonizing the government, right wingers started pushing for gun ownership for a reason the Founding Fathers never intended.
Protecting themselves from the government.
Our government.
You might have thought that all the school shooting since the mid to late ’90s would bring some sanity to the debate. But when an angry young white man shot up a Connecticut elementary school and killed 20 children ages 6 or 7 among other victims and all we got from it were thoughts and prayers, that was pretty much it.
Twenty little kids.
Can you imagine anything more horrible? I can’t. I feel very fortunate that most years, my six grandchildren live and go to school in other countries.
And to steal a quote on a different subject from Thomas Jefferson …
When I consider that God is Just, I fear for my country.