Again?

Addendum:  I found the Bill Hicks essay referenced below here's a link to Two Myths Explored, Debunked, And Other Rantings.  It can be found in his book Love All The People.  His wisdom and humor are sorely missed.

     Given the horrific events that took place in Parkland, FL yesterday, the sadness and grief brought on by another mass shooting at a school led me down the path of “What's the point?”  The same tired arguments are going to be trotted out by those who have been bought and those who are outraged will quickly forget the tragic loss.  Nothing will happen except for another shooting in a few days.  Then my anger kicked in along with a sense of evil triumphing because I chose to do nothing.

     The National Rifle Association is not a rights advocacy group.  They are a manufacturing lobby that could be considered a terrorist organization.  Their weapon of terror is money.  They use it to threaten our elected officials into inaction.  If the lightweights don't vote their way, they take their money away and fund candidates that will do their bidding.  They use money to keep us all afraid with their ad campaigns so that people continue to buy their products.  Do you honestly think that Wayne LaPierre can afford those poorly fitted suits and interesting haircuts on membership dues alone?

     I think that my right to live without the fear of someone shooting me on this coast to coast killing field that America has become far outweighs someone else's right to buy a killing machine because they think guns are cool and a lot of fun to make things go “boom.”  Bill Hicks said something along the lines of, “If you can't diagram the first sentence of the 2^nd Amendment, then you are not smart enough to buy a gun.”

     In the coming days there will be the relatively new line of horse shit saying that we need to focus on mental health and not the fact that military grade assault weapons more readily available than birth control.  No shit, Sherlock.  Mental health has always been overlooked in this country but maybe we should focus on it when there isn't a mass shooting and then do nothing about it until we talk it over again after the next mass shooting.  If we didn't act like a collective bunch of 2^nd graders hopped up on sugar, maybe we could have an actual conversation about mental health and to start removing the stigma that goes along with it.  I am 90% sure that if I ever owned a gun, I would probably be dead after one bad day.  These killing machines provide such an easy exit for those with problems.

     More and more people aren't buying guns for "protection" or hunting.  They're buying guns because they like to go to the range and blow off steam after a shitty day at their shitty jobs.  Again, it's because these killing machines look cool and are fun to play with.  Maybe it's time for the toys to be taken away because we clearly aren't responsible enough as a people to have them.  At our worst, human beings are savage, stupid animals and should have less ways available to display that fact.

     Seventeen more futures have been snuffed out in an instant.  Add that to the twenty six futures snuffed out in Sandy Hook.  How many of those kids would have come up with the next scientific breakthrough, written the next great novel, recorded the next great album or just have been a kinder, more caring human being?  We'll never know.   And that's why my tears are not of sadness but of rage.  Every time one of these school shootings occurs, we are pissing away our future in a very preventable manner.

     Seventeen more sets of parents that will never see their kids come home from school.  When I send my daughter to school in the morning, I should not have to wonder if that will be the last time I ever see her.

    This is not a Constitutional issue.  The document was written and intended to be changed by future generations.  We live in a country where we've had obscenity trials over Batman, Robin and George Carlin.  There have been trials over the content of our textbooks because some people want to believe that we are all descended from two people.  Christian/parent groups feign outrage over books and records to the point where they will burn them in the town square.  We will put effort into attacking the 1^st Amendment but say, “Welp, there's nothin' we can do 'bout it” when it comes to the 2^nd Amendment.  Last I recall, Tropic Of Cancer has never left a trail of dead in its wake.  Doing great, difficult things for the betterment of humanity seems to be something that America has gotten allergic to in recent history.

     Maybe, instead of expelling this kid from school, if someone had taken an interest in him and gave him a copy of Slaughterhouse Five and the first four Black Sabbath records, there would have been a different outcome.  The system failed this kid.  There were many warning signs that someone might have caught, if they were paying attention and/or cared to enough to do something about it.  This does not excuse his actions but people wonder why this happens and something led to it.  I remember the anger of my youth and luckily there were people around me to put books and records in my hands instead of a killing machine.

     The forthcoming lack of action on the part of our elected officials will be a deafening silence.  When five people get the runny dumps because they all had food made from the same batch of green onions, we shut the restaurant down and trace back the steps travelled by those onions and you won't be able to find green onions in the grocery store for weeks.  I'm going to take a bold stance here and say that dead children might be a more pressing issue than the runny dumps.  So why don't we trace the cause of their deaths back down the very apparent path travelled and recall the killing machines because they are fatal to human beings?

     The thoughts and prayers bullshit has got to stop.  Someone might want to tell Mike Pence that just like “The Gay,” bullets can't be prayed away.  I would say that 45 should do something for once to make us great but he is a ball-less sack of an empty suit that's too busy plundering the treasury to pay attention.   If all of these Christians actually looked into what this Jesus fellow was saying, they'd be shocked to see that his message was centered in love and kindness.  Not isolate and arm up.

     Then there's the “good guy with a gun” nonsense which is nothing more than trying to put out fire with gasoline so the manufacturers can sell more killing machines.  This kid came in with an assault rifle, that is advertised as being capable of maximizing casualties, cocked and loaded.  There is no way an armed security guard would have been able to draw his holstered weapon, drop the safety, put a round in the chamber and save the day before the situation would have escalated above his pay grade.  The solution to the problem is for these weapons to not be available to the public.  If we didn't live in, and constantly breed, a culture of fear, people wouldn't feel compelled to want to own these killing machines.

     Since the 2018 mid term elections are approaching, I can't wait for the NRA's dopey election report card to be released so I can vote for every candidate that I can that has an F rating.  It seems that the only course of action for the people at large is to vote these whores out of office since no one else will cut the NRA's purse strings.

     The late Michelle McNamara used to say, “It's chaos.  Be Kind.”  If we were all a little kinder to each other it might just stem the tide of awfulness that seems to be growing with the fear and hatred that is spewing forth on a regular basis these days.  We should hug our children a little tighter.  We should listen to our children a little closer.  We should call our parents, even if we don't want to.  And goddammit we should be kind.