Is there really anything to say about school shootings anymore? Since everyone on both sides understands full well that nothing at all will ever be done about any of it, the whole thing has turned into a sad, repetitive kabuki.
Gun-control advocates will cite the usual litany of statistics and call for more background checks and mental health screenings, all well and good but completely useless in preventing a sick kid from taking daddy's legally-obtained gun. You want to make a dent in this thing, start figuring out a way to require liability insurance on firearms. We all have to have insurance to drive our automobiles (the other quintessentially 'murkin item, in that we are conditioned for life to self-actualize through our driving choices).
So it doesn't seem too onerous to propose that, say, if your son is caught outside the fucking White House with a bunch of weapons that are confiscated and handed back to you -- with an admonition not to give them back to your mentally-ill son -- and you give the weapons back to your son anyway, and he shoots up a Waffle House, well, not only are you a flaming dipshit, but you deserve to spend the rest of your miserable life making restitution to the families of those your son slaughtered. Any decent society would shun such an individual. He is morally responsible for the deaths of those people, even if, through some shameful quirks of the gun laws of his state, he isn't legally responsible.
I promise you, if we hold people financially responsible for the damage caused by their weapons, they'll be a lot more goddamned careful about locking them up and lending them out. But no one seems to be talking about that, not at the level you hear the other stuff anyway.
The gun-humpers, of course, are infinitely worse. Christ, are these people fucking tedious. You know what they're going to say before they say it. It's now just a perverse wager, the over-under on how many hours will elapse before:
We've got some real decisions to make here, folks. Either you're tired of this shit, tired enough to vote for any sort of change at all to this country's bizarre mania for guns, or you're not. We can talk about NRA money or Koch money or whatever money goes to which candidate, but either people are sentient enough to pay attention and not be bought off by some stupid political ads, or they aren't.
And if they aren't aware enough to watch the ads and still understand what their rational self-interest really is, then we're done anyway. The body just hasn't fallen to the ground yet.
Gun-control advocates will cite the usual litany of statistics and call for more background checks and mental health screenings, all well and good but completely useless in preventing a sick kid from taking daddy's legally-obtained gun. You want to make a dent in this thing, start figuring out a way to require liability insurance on firearms. We all have to have insurance to drive our automobiles (the other quintessentially 'murkin item, in that we are conditioned for life to self-actualize through our driving choices).
So it doesn't seem too onerous to propose that, say, if your son is caught outside the fucking White House with a bunch of weapons that are confiscated and handed back to you -- with an admonition not to give them back to your mentally-ill son -- and you give the weapons back to your son anyway, and he shoots up a Waffle House, well, not only are you a flaming dipshit, but you deserve to spend the rest of your miserable life making restitution to the families of those your son slaughtered. Any decent society would shun such an individual. He is morally responsible for the deaths of those people, even if, through some shameful quirks of the gun laws of his state, he isn't legally responsible.
I promise you, if we hold people financially responsible for the damage caused by their weapons, they'll be a lot more goddamned careful about locking them up and lending them out. But no one seems to be talking about that, not at the level you hear the other stuff anyway.
The gun-humpers, of course, are infinitely worse. Christ, are these people fucking tedious. You know what they're going to say before they say it. It's now just a perverse wager, the over-under on how many hours will elapse before:
- Someone will accuse the survivors of being "crisis actors" paid by George Soros, who apparently writes checks to strangers like most people draw breath.
- Someone will attempt to draw a tenuous political motivation (within minutes of the shooter being identified, someone literally started a Facebook page in his name, complete with photo-shopped pics of him wearing a Hillary cap and Antifa gear.
- Someone will show up at the school where kids were just murdered, the bodies not even cold yet, armed and stupid and ready to scribble some incoherent manifesto.
We've got some real decisions to make here, folks. Either you're tired of this shit, tired enough to vote for any sort of change at all to this country's bizarre mania for guns, or you're not. We can talk about NRA money or Koch money or whatever money goes to which candidate, but either people are sentient enough to pay attention and not be bought off by some stupid political ads, or they aren't.
And if they aren't aware enough to watch the ads and still understand what their rational self-interest really is, then we're done anyway. The body just hasn't fallen to the ground yet.
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