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Showing posts with label Newton shooting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Newton shooting. Show all posts

Sunday, August 02, 2015

The Price of Admission is Bullets

Unwittingly, I became a member of a club no one wants to belong to early on a chilly Friday morning, December 14, 2012. I had never even heard of this club. There is no formal name for this group and we don't have a clubhouse. The members are from across the country, all races, ages and genders. We live in urban areas, the suburbs and rural communities. Yet we all met the memberships' one criterion, a life taken by gun violence. The price of admission to this club is bullets. 

The price of my admission was my sister Mary Sherlach.

---Jane Dougherty, sister of Mary Sherlach, killed at Sandy Hook on December 12, 2012. 

Monday, June 08, 2015

Young American Taliban

Check out this photo:




















It's from a collection of photos that were found in Nancy Lanza's home after the policed searched during the Sandy Hook investigation. It is not known whether this is Adam or not. Either way, I find this to be profoundly disturbing. What kind of seriously fucked up mentality brings you to a place like this?

Oh, right....the same as this one...



















So, how much longer are we going to put up with this ideology?

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Crazy Uncle and the Cassette Tape

Since the tragedy last Friday in Newton, I've had something percolating in the back of my head. David Frums's recent post on what they president should not do was the catalyst. The president can't fight an ideology so intransigent that even the Lord our God couldn't move them. But I'll tell you who can.

People like our own Nikto.

I don't necessarily agree with everything that Nikto has been saying on gun control but I also haven't heard any adequate defense of why ordinary citizens need to be able to protect themselves with military grade weaponry. Thus far, it's the usual meme of "You're stupid" with a dash of genetic fallacy. They can say why they are against it but not why they are for it. To do so would mean being honest. What is that truth?

They think that these types of weapons are cool and they like to blow shit up. And they have a pathological hatred of the US government and believe think that the NBC television program, Revolution, is likely to happen. The problem with trying to engage these people is that our culture is generally fair minded and the fallout from this puts sanity at a disadvantage. I liken it to what I call The Crazy Uncle.

The Crazy Uncle is the guy in your family that you see at the holidays who doesn't get out much. He spends his days in the bubble of the Drudge Report and other right wing hotspots believing that this is what the world is really like. He is most definitely armed with an array of these types of weapons and, at the holiday meal, will inevitably say something so far off in moonbat land that you question his sanity.

But then a funny thing happens. The rest of the people at the table are polite and start to accept the "logic" of some of his arguments. It's not too long before the moderate conversation gets pulled to the right and now the "middle" is somewhere around the 10 yard line on the right side of the field. This is what happens when we embrace the Cult of Both Sides. This is what is happening on a macro level on our culture. The Crazy Uncles of the world know this and that's why they do it, saying crazier and crazier shit to see how much they can get away with (Hitler's big lie scenario). Never was this more true than with the gun debate.

So, to unfuck this kind of thinking, the government has to stay out of it. I know they are going to try do something anyway but given the power of the gun lobby (and despite the NRA saying that this Friday they are going to unveil plans to make sure this never happens again), it's going to be nearly impossible for them to accomplish this paradigm shift. 

But that's shouldn't stop ordinary citizens from forming a private organization that rivals or even surpasses the gun lobby. Frum's example of MADD is a good one. There are plenty of people right now that have lost loved ones in school shootings and they could form the nucleus of such an organization. And the time has sadly never been better. All they need to do is start talking about the 20 children who had as many as 11 bullets in the bodies.

The Right is quite fond of talking about how the free market should do its thing without interference from the government.  They point to letting people's behavior and tastes dictate supply and demand. Well, stocks in gun manufacturers are plummeting after Friday's shooting. Cerberus is selling Bushmaster. Dick's will no longer carry certain types of guns. A general distaste for guns is starting to grow in our culture. This one was different, folks and things are going to change. This change and increasing distaste will be hastened if a new, private organization like MADD gets to work now.

It may end being that many of these military style guns go the way of the cassette tape.  A few people still have that moldy old soundtrack to 9 1/2 weeks laying in their old Geo Prizm (likely that same crazy uncle) but no one really plays them anymore. Why?

Because they just aren't cool anymore.