Tweet of the day (Guns)

[calimary]

27. Well... I'd wonder how this stacks up in the homeland security department.

How does this make one feel - regarding one's safety here in the homeland? I certainly don't feel safer, knowing that the next guy I might inadvertently cut off on the freeway could be armed to the teeth, or knowing that I'll probably always feel some deep visceral fear the next time I go to a public movie theater or worse - knowing that my son or daughter has gone to see some movie in a public theater! I was at a club the other night with more than 300 people on hand to see my son's band. I looked around that crowd and actually found myself wondering - "hmmm - just the simple law of averages tells me that some small percentage of the people IN THIS ROOM could be packing heat. And what if one of them is set off by something? Just ONE would be all it'd take."

And before someone speaks up about "well, maybe it wouldn't happen if the bad guy knew other people were carrying guns..." or "maybe if somebody had had a gun in that Aurora CO theater last night, this bad guy would have been stopped." Yeah, sure. In that kind of instant madness and tear gas keeping you from breathing or even seeing in front of you, how could you take a shot at the bad guy? How would you even know what (or whom) you hit? What if you hit another innocent bystander by mistake, in the frenzy and insanity of that kind of situation? How could you even have the presence of mind in the middle of an instant war that just erupted all around you in a confined space with hysterical panicky people all over the place? What you would have had would be just more carnage - a regular ol' Gunfight at the OK Corral. It would have been even more out-of-control than this nightmare already wound up being.

FOR ME: anyone or any organization that protects an absolute, unrestricted right for ANYBODY no matter how unspooled they are, mentally, to possess any goddamn AK-47s or armor-piercing bullets or other high-octane paramilitary crap for personal use - if they're not in a war zone - makes me feel awfully vulnerable and endangered. And NO it doesn't make me want to respond by getting guns like that myself, and thus upping the ante. And that's what the NRA does. And even though their precious Second Amendment carries the language "WELL-REGULATED militia" they disregard that entirely. I've heard staunch Second Amendment defenders insisting that wording doesn't mean anything, or that it actually means something different, or that "oh no, it doesn't apply to this or that." They always have some way of talking around it.

We HAVE to toughen up gun regulations. This tragedy just underscores that. And maybe the NRA is just gonna have to let up on its ridiculously strident refusal to compromise at some point.

I mean - WHERE DOES IT END, permatex? Would you rather just let it go? Just ignore it? Is that okay? Is that something you can live with (even though, just here alone, we have at least 12 people who can never live with it - or anything else, for that matter - again)? Just let it happen again because "those things happen"? Just shrug it off as "it was just one nutcase"? For God's Sake! So how many nutcases and deaths and maimings and real-life horror before YOU have had enough? When will we all have FINALLY had enough???? What will it take?

And - look, I'm sorry, I don't mean to come down so hard on YOU personally, permatex. For God's Sake, I remember when John Lennon got shot (by just one nutcase, funny enough), and then-President-Elect ronald reagan somberly intoned that it was a terrible thing - but by God we've gotta make sure we keep our GUNS! And then HE was shot and nearly killed some three months later (by, guess what? Yet again, just one nutcase) and even then, EVEN THEN, he STILL insisted that hey, but... but... but... we still gotta have our GUNS! We simply can't deprive ANYBODY of having GUNS!

WHAT THE FUCKING HELL???????

It's gotta end. It just simply CANNOT continue like this. The NRA needs to shut up and back off and get some SENSE, and stop playing the victim when they're so goddamn powerful and influential and oppressive. Always so paranoid about somebody coming to take their beloved precious sacred fucking guns. Well, maybe it's finally time that somebody did. This isn't Dodge City in the late 1800s, for God's Sake. To me, this is a perfect example of domestic terrorism, and the NRA staunchly defends it and resolutely blocks any attempt to rein in the extremes of gun ownership that it protects. A right it protects at the expense of the rights of those dead victims in that theater - who are now permanently deprived of their lives and their futures. What rights did they have? Hey NRA, what about THEIR rights? Never mind, NRA, we all know YOUR rights are far more important than theirs.

I'm with Michael Bloomberg on this. And of course, that's about as far as it's gonna go...