It has been 25 years since I watched a Super Bowl and more than 15 years since I watched a professional football game.
So whether Tom Brady is Football Jesus or Patrick Mahomes is challenging him matters less to me than who wins the Golden Globe awards or whether my cell phone bill is increasing.
And I’m not sure I realized that Kansas City now goes to the Super Bowl almost every year and wins more than it loses.
You might have thought winning back-to-back Super Bowls would leave western Missouri and eastern Kansas in a lengthy state of ecstasy looking ahead to the possibility of a threepeat.
Not in Donald Trump’s America.
Especially in Missouri, which has some of the laxest gun laws in the country. The Shoot Me, er Show Me, State is one of the few that doesn’t require gun owners to have reached a certain age. And while there is a federal law making it very difficult for minors to own guns, the state that was home to Rush Limbaugh and Josh Hawley passed a bill three years ago declaring federal gun laws invalid in the state.
In fact, the law prohibited state and local officials from enforcing such laws.
I lived in Missouri for two and a half years in the mid ’80s — pre-Limbaugh and Hawley — but with the gun situation what it is now, Missouri becomes essentially a flyover state to me.
I lived in a pro-gun state, but even we don’t allow open carry for toddlers.
Of course the two too-young guns that killed one person and wounded two dozen others at Kansas City’s celebration weren’t actually toddlers. But what kind of person goes to a celebratory parade after their team has won the Super Bowl packing heat?
What kind of person goes to an event where people are almost all joyful knowing they are going to spoil it? Knowing they will change a happy occasion into a nightmarish one? Knowing that for some it will be the last thing they ever experience?
Thoughts and prayers, huh?
Pardon my anger, but fuck thoughts and prayers.
And don’t say it’s about freedom either. Don’t say America is somehow so different from all the other civilized nations in the world that we have to have tens of thousands of gun deaths a year.
It was Kris Kristofferson who said freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose.
We’ve still got plenty to lose.
It’s a shame we can’t lose the guns.