While driving to work in Corning, there is a large old broken down Army truck along the Interstate 5 freeway. On the side of the truck is a large sign: "PREPPERS AMMUNITION AVAILABLE!" What are these paranoid Preppers preparing for? What do they need more ammunition for? Truthfully, they are preparing to kill some innocent animals or human beings.
I live in a safe, quiet, rural area. The cities near me are Red Bluff and Redding. Both cities are ranked in the top ten most Redneck cities in California. Rednecks, often right wing white Republicans, are a fearful and selfish lot always fretting about and Prepping for civil war, race war, Christian Defense war, or some kind or other of end of the world spiritual apocalypse. They seem forever to be lamenting that they can't trust anyone. They seem happier when hating somebody.
This week, a 7th grade boy was checking out a hunting book in the library. I asked him if he enjoyed this hunting season. He said that he liked to shoot squirrels with his rifle. I asked if he ate squirrels. He said "No." "Why do you kill them," I asked politely. He smiled and answered, "for fun."
The sociopath that killed 9 people at an Oregon Community College last week had 14 guns in his apartment. You know that he spent hours fondling guns and bullets, allowing his petty discontents about women fester in his sick mind as he relished the feel of his precious steel guns. The callous deranged killer of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School had many guns in his home, and spent countless hours playing violent shoot and kill video games. The racist murderer of 9 people at a church service in South Carolina, toyed with guns as he harbored the drug addled thoughts of a cold blooded White-Power killer. The Colorado movie theater killer, dressed like GI Joe or some ISIS thug, loaded down with automatic weapons, bombs, tear gas, and bullet proof vests, showed his lust for gunning down 82 innocent people for no reason whatsoever. The Columbine High boys, dressed in black like some kind of faux Matrix ninjas, murdered 12 and wounded 21 more, and shot people in the face like they were killing squirrels. The scoundrel traitor Major Hasan screamed "Allau Akabar" as he murdered 13 and wounded 30 of his fellow soldiers, all highly trained to defend themselves, at Fort Hood. A right-wing extremist machine gunned and killed 77 teenagers on a holiday in Norway. How many wives and children have been shot to death by a discontented, angry, jealous, or cruel husband— a weak and pathetic man with a steel trigger on his finger? A child arguing with and killing a neighbor child with a pistol? And, how many people kill with guns "for fun." Wake Up People: Over 11,000 people are murdered with a gun every year in America.
We poured ice cold water over our heads and raised funds for the ALS victims. 5,000 unfortunate persons die of ALS each year in America. Over 11,000 people are murdered with a gun every year in America. How many tens of thousands more are seriously injured from gunshot wounds each year in America??? Every year, in America, over 100,000 people are shot with a gun.
I read this week an excellent opinion piece by Paul Waldman titled "Ben Carson Perfectly Explains the Republican Position on Guns." These Republican candidates support a bizarre solution to this rampant gun violence: sell more guns and put more guns in more people's hands; or, Jeb Bush shrugs and says "stuff happens" and we should do nothing.
More people wearing pistols into supermarkets, churches, schools, shopping centers, bars, restaurants? Everyone tensed and armed and fearful and untrusting and waiting and enabled to kill three people in five seconds? No limits on guns? Teachers and preachers with guns strapped to their waist? Great news for the NRA, gun manufactures, bullet manufactures, holster makers, gun salesmen- all those that greedily profit from gun fetishism and killing urges. However, not so good news for me shopping for groceries at Raley's when some drunken local redneck yokel thinks I offended his fragile honor, and, with pistol holstered and ready at hand ... bang, bang, I'm dead. Crazy! Like that gun toting retired policeman who shot to death a man in a movie theater because the discourteous fellow spilled some popcorn on him and talked too loud.
In the days of the first version of the Constitution, pistols and rifles could just make one shot. One shot, and then time to reload. [Ben Carson could back then lead the charge to tackle the one bullet bully and save the day; then, he could go back to being the slave of some heartless white Southern plantation owner.] Naturally, with that kind of firepower in those long ago days of only farmers in back woods settlements, there was little question about "the right to bear arms." We live in different times. Modern arms can rapid fire many shots in seconds. Nearly everyone lives in a city. It is high time to change the Constitution regarding this out of date "right." The "Constitution" has changed many times, e.g., Christian men refused to allow all women to vote until after 1920 (19th Amendment). Change the laws about gun manufacturing, sales, ownership, and use.
99.99% of people flying on airplanes are not terrorists, but we have no problem with spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year trying to prevent terrorist attacks on airplanes. What are we doing to prevent gun worshippers and assorted angry lunatics from killing over 11,000 people just last year in America? Or, from killing millions of innocent animals "for fun." What are we doing? Nothing— "stuff happens."
Guns do kill people. People kill people with guns. People kill innocent animals with guns. People who own and use guns do think about and fantasize about killing animals and people. Preppers are preparing to kill people and animals and lurking foreign terrorists. Countless video games and television shows feature killing, crimes, violence, gangs, hunting animals, and gun fun. If that is not enough, we invent new creatures to kill: the walking dead zombies, vampires, demons, ghosts, Big Foot, space aliens, monster snakes, godzilla, mutated flies ... Shame on America. Cruel America. Violence loving America. Just last year, this hate filled, fearful, desperate, and self-loathing America had over 21,000 people put a gun to their head and blow their brains apart. Ugly! Unnecessary!
Some people have proposed reasonable solutions to gun control that need to be adopted. Stop manufacturing and selling military grade weapons and machine guns. Make gun owners and gun manufacturers pay for special insurance, just like we do for automobiles, to provide some measure of restitution to persons wounded by guns or killed by guns. Educate children in schools about the dangers of guns, e.g., over 500 people are killed each year in American in gun "accidents." Legislators can do something! More important, Americans need to shed their cowboy fantasies, their gun fetishes, their worship of firearms, their perverted desires to possess more and more guns and display them in a threatening manner, and stop the celebration of killing innocent wild animals. Some changes can be legislated, others must come from a change of heart and mind.
Men once thought that smoking tobacco was macho cool, part of the rugged cowboy mystique. Seeing a few wheezing and emaciated smoker friends suffering miserably and dying of emphysema or cancer in a modern hospital room, and anti-smoking public education campaigns, and restricting smoking in public locations, and warning labels, and higher taxes on tobacco ... all have resulted in fewer people smoking these days. Why not some similar efforts at defusing our gun loving mania and murderous ways in America?
And, reduce the number of hours you waste watching television. Television is largely a pathetic front for commercial advertising wrapped around programs featuring violence or trivial humor or celebrity worship. Watching fewer crime dramas might help reduce our urges to kill someone. Come on people, Duck Dynasty?, dirty bearded stinky old men killing animals and drinking beer, or poor anti-social loners hunting caribou in wild Alaska ... how is this relevant to how 90% of Americans actually live. Or, watching old rich rock stars tell us about the joys of blasting ducks apart with shotguns and being shills for the NRA is just blow-hard tiresome ted. Wake up! Stop feeding your violent fantasies! Grow vegetables, garden, nuture loving kindness, cultivate decent friendships, create peace; don't daydream about sawing the antlers off a deer's bloody skull that you shot to death "for fun." Realign your values!
Seems like, in America, the family that kills together stays together. Teach you children well, Papa Rifleman. Their camouflaged bravado— really just pretending to mask their underlying defensiveness, weakness, fears, and lusts to kill something. Sure, Donald Trump, let these kinds of gun toting folks into your church or restaurant or casino— you can really trust people that fondle automatic weapons. They look Prepped, grossly fat from eating dead ducks and armadillos, and ready to blast away anybody who questions their sanity. We will let Ben Carlson, that phony and unrealistic pseudo hero, rush to the front of the class when these types of folks come into the classroom Prepped to kill us all.
[Unquestionably, rants like the above include some exaggerations and sharp rhetoric. Many Red Bluff and Redding folks are decent, honest, kind, and trustworthy. Not all gun owners think about killing animals or other people. Self-defense does have a legitimate place in our lives; rarely, thankfully. There are a few Republicans like Gabby Giffords that support some gun control measures. Nevertheless, I still stand by my main points: many people have an excessive and dangerous gun loving addiction, we encourage and pleasure ourselves with violence excessively, and we lack the will and courage to self-change and public-change away from this trend towards fear-hate, stockpiling guns, killing animals, and a bang bang your dead macho but unmanly bravado.]
Well said.
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