Kid smuggles a shotgun into a junior high school gym in Roswell, NM, gets off three rounds, leaves two classmates badly wounded.
New Mexico is one of the more gun-friendly states. Allows "concealed carry." In almost any town in New Mexico you can take four or five steps, turn around, and be looking at a gun show. At New Mexico gun shows if you can walk, talk and carry cash, you can buy a piece -- no background check. Pay and play.
Guy totes a semi-automatic handgun into a supermarket in Indiana. (Well, maybe that steak isn't really dead. Can't be too careful these days.) Shoots and kills two customers -- 12 aisles apart -- before the cops arrive and off him.
In Detroit, a 4-year-old girl kills her 4-year-old cousin with a rifle she found under a bed at her home.
At the end of 2013, more than 12,000 people had been killed by gunshot in this country since the massacre of the innocents at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., stirred outrage among the hand-wringers and milquetoasts. Fortunately, the NRA stood firm and there are 12,000 fewer potential free-riders, dole-takers and welfare queens in the country.
Painful though it may be, you gotta be realistic about this stuff. Congress is too busy placing more sanctions on Iran for daring to suggest negotiating peace; can't be bothered considering legislation to, maybe, put a few restrictions on who can buy, carry and use lethal weapons. Besides, they've got a government to shut down periodically, just because they can.
Government is too big, anyhow, so we can't let it be poking its fat nose into our gun cabinets, holsters and pick-up truck gun racks. Then again, it's pefectly welcome to poke its fat nose into our bedrooms to prevent same-gender s-e-x and into our clinics to prevent women from making their own health care decisions.
It's perfectly OK for kids too young to drive to have access to weapons that can take out five people with a single pull of the triggger. After all, isn't this the country that thinks it's OK for the president to assume the power to kill citizens, or imprison them forever without charge or trial, just because he thinks they might be friendly to terrorists?
And why the hell shouldn't we expect to be at risk while shopping or going to school? Frackers and coal processors are poisoning the water we drink. Corporate polluters are poisoning the air we breathe. Crooked bankers and financiers are stealing the pittances we earn. Risk is everywhere! Get used to it and stop whining!
Put more cops in our shops and our schools. Even if we can't afford to pay them a living wage. Give 'em tanks and drones and maybe even tactical nukes. So what if they take out more friendlies than bad guys? Collateral damage.
It's the American way.
