FTT Off-Topic: By All Means, Let's Make Killers Famous

Next Man (Inevitably) Up

Not sports, move on or not.

So there has been a mild amount of hue and cry (it's almost always more cry than hue) about how the media is making the latest NRA Achiever famous. We now know all about the guy in Oregon who had mental issues, this one with a taste to kill people with a majority religious view, and some among us feel that this is gross. We should not give a criminal the fame that he so clearly wanted, is the argument.

And sure, on some level, that seems to make sense. After all, we would not want to, in a country that has more guns than people, encourage people with marginal intellect and/or sanity to try for fame in  a way that seems frankly easy, especially because being famous is more important, for a distressingly large number of citizens, than being good at your job.

Guns are very good at their job. You can kill a lot of people with one, really quickly, with minimal training. But I digress. I also digress about whether we'd have any movement on this if the next five to ten shooters were somehow all not white guys. Oh, the digressions.

Anyway... the gun control horse, we have been shown over and over and over, has left the barn. The rights of people who like to cite the wisdom of men who has been dead for three hundred years -- just in this single aspect of human expression, mind you, there will be no reading of literature from that age, listening to music from that period, watching plays from that time, looking at art, practicing of medicine or cooking or entertainment or religion, only for politics is the Wisdom of American Ancients worth knowing...

Well, they won. We should have all realized this when dozens of breathtakingly young children were killed and not a single thing was done about it. Not even tracking the number of dead was allowed by the Congress that has been bought and bought many times by gun lobbyists above all others. People who like to shoot guns, and the political lobby that transforms that into aiding and abetting people who kill more Americans than traditional terrorists ever have or ever will, are more important than everyone else.

So tell us about the shooter. Put his name up in lights. Count his kills as if life were a video game. Talk about what he did right, in terms of making sure he had enough ammo, aiming for the chest instead of the head, and how his selection of watering hole was particularly inspired, and what he did wrong, in terms of just not gong to a place with enough of a population density to get the kill count up high enough.You know, for Real Fame.

Print his likeness on baseball cards. Figure out some way to turn this into a fantasy sport. Monetize his efforts by selling the evidence to collectors, and linking out all of his fashion choices to the appropriate retailers. Put out collectible cups with fast food value meals, and name said meals in relation to the number of people killed. The Sandy Hook Extra Value Meal, because that one just feeds a party's worth of people. Aurorar Popcorn Chicken Bucket (ties in with the movie theater setting, ya see). Charlestown Spicy Ribs with Down Home Biscuits and Dippin' Sauce (red, naturally).

You don't have to go national with the promotions. Every region can have its own.

Remember, gun death victims don't die in vain. They die by the thousands, in great and terrible pain, in injustice that's intolerable in anything but a protected hobby, and they die in anonymity.

So let's at least make the killers famous.

We might as well get *something* out of being too stupid to live. (Besides, well, guns.)