FTT Off-Topic: Fear Wins

Mourn Here Often?

Not sports, move on or not.

I've been reading about the South Carolina shootings, where, unless you live under a rock, nine people were killed by a 21-year-old white power pud, who went to a historic black church on a Wednesday, then decided that these people were the big problems in society, and went to murdering. He took out people aged 26 to 87, showed the nation once again just how little we've actually progressed on the stuff that matters, and we now get to relive the eternally pointless question about why America is so blessed to be uniquely smart about guns among First World nations. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What strikes me about the case in question is the following:

> Honestly, 21-year-olds have been steeped in enough hate and scapegoating to throw so many lives away? That's darkly impressive, people. I've been writing professionally for three decades now, but I've never moved an audience to that level of civic participation.

> Weren't the young'uns supposed to be the generations that were beyond this sort of thing? Oh, not so much.

> Smallest consolation: this ends Crazy White Woman Who Sees Herself As Black's 15 minutes of fame, right?

>  The fact that Fox tried to spin this as a terrorist attack against Christians, rather than blacks... at some point, you just have to give it up for epic trolling, really. Oh, wait, actually you don't, especially when it's purported to be news.

> As previously stated n this here blog, never forget that this is the best we can do as a nation -- damn near monthly outrages and slaughters because a small subset of the population has a hobby they enjoy. (Yes, it's a hobby to own a gun. You aren't stopping tyrannical government -- we've already got that through corporate malfeasance, and if you want to tell me about all of the wonderful aspects of gun culture, we can A/B comp it with other hobbies like heroin use, incest and wife battering. I'm betting your hobby kills more people.)

> You know how we're always supposed to go about our business after a terrorist attack, because if we don't, they win? Well, the terrorists have won, are winning, and will keep winning every day in his country. There are portions of the country where I wouldn't go on a bet, because the gun terrorists are everywhere. There open carry bags of human filth that seem to think that they aren't, well, the biggest and worst bullies and psychopaths that the country has seen in forever. And there are people who seem to think that if we can only convince everyone to carry the means to end a life every minute of the day, we'll finally be safe from people who act on those means.

It's their country, people. The rest of us just get to be afraid in it.

We now return you to your previously scheduled windmill jousting event.