FTT Off-Topic: Same As It Ever Was

Buy stock in companies that make yellow tape

Time to go way off the path and annoy some regular readers. You've been warned; we're going to talk Colorado Movie Massacre. (And no, I don't think it's fair to cite the name of the movie in this; people who think that movies provoke murders have been around for decades now, and the argument just doesn't hold water. After all, the murders never occur on reruns; if there were real deviltry in the product, they'd inspire every time out. Moving on.)

Click on this link, and you'll be taken to a fun little PDF that details all of the mass gun killings in the United States since 2005. Each incident is dealt with clinically, in a few lines of dispassionate copy. Six or seven incidents fit on each page, and each incident is only made possible through the twin miracles of modern weapon technology, and a country that restricts cough medicine about as much as it does guns.

Review it, if you like, but don't print it.

After all, you probably don't want to sit around waiting for all 62 pages to come out of your printer. And ink's expensive.

Now, I'm not going to convince anyone on the merits of legislating guns like, well, the rest of the First World. We're America, dammit, and the rest of the world's rules do not apply here; it's amazing that we even admit to gravity, inertia, friction or any other elemental force that might get in our way. If only the entire citizenry were armed and ready to take out a committed madman with a frighteningly effective plan, aided and abetted by legally obtained tear gas, everything would just be macho fine, and so many people wouldn't be so uppity.

Sorry, sidebar.

Seriously, tear gas? Anyone not on the NRA payroll want to defend the sporting use of tear gas? Does it tenderize venison and make it especially spicy? No, didn't think so.

Now, we know how the next 3 to 7 days will play out, right? A couple of lesser idiots will try to copycat this vile twerp. People with an axe to grind will try to figure out the twerp's politics, to see if they can attach this to a narrative of how the other side is so less than human that we can, well, dream up revenge fantasies or some other hope of advancing an agenda. Others will chastise for making this political, as if there is a required amount of time to mourn, or as if we really need to spend the down time processing the latest tragedy.

This happens all the time. I don't need any time to process it, any more than I might need time to process a thunderstorm.

If the shooter is brown, it's terrorism. If he's white, it's proof of the decline of civilization and/or the corrosive effects of The Culture. If he's black or Asiatic or a she, it's proof of the last great wall in American society coming down, down, down, and why are those folks now just so angry? And for a couple of days, there will be talk over how this incident, so much more horrible than the last, might be the one that finally turns things back against guns, guns, guns everywhere.

Folks, let me save us all some time.

Nothing is going to change. It's not going to happen.

In my lifetime, a President was shot, and his top people paralyzed, by guns. Thirteen years ago, children were mowed down like cattle in the same basic area as today's shooting, and nothing changed. A year ago, a standing US Congresswoman was permanently damaged while others died around her. It didn't change when Martin Luther King was shot, it didn't change when Malcolm X was shot, it didn't change when John Lennon was shot, it didn't change when John and Robert Kennedy was shot, and so on, and so on, and so on...

The people who want to have guns have money, and they spend it on politicians. They also don't get distracted, don't go away, and don't vote on anything but this issue. The politicians that take that money do what they are told, and are not voted out of office because of it.

The people who want to have guns taken away do not give money to politicians. They don't think that they should have to pay to have guns become more restricted. They are wrong, in that nothing happens in this country without politicians getting paid. And no one, to my knowledge, has ever lost their office for being too much in the pocket of the NRA.

So, folks?

Don't make the mistake in thinking that page 63, or page 75, or page 250 of the future PDF is going to be the Magic Page.

Do not think that we're going to any place other than the place we've always been.

And also, don't make the mistake that another pile of fresh dead will make any damn bit of difference at all.

They never have, and never will.

And if this opinion pisses you off, makes you think I'm callous, unfeeling, coarse, monstrous?

Well, prove me wrong.

Change the laws. Vote out the people who always vote for guns. Make those that replace them outlaw items of over the top maniac aid, roll back the gains seen over the decades. Maybe even insist on technological advancements that take some of the potential for massacres away.

Or, well, just accept that money is more important than lives here.

And always has been...