They're Not Going Away
In America guns are like cars. They're not going away. It's possible to point to a few (very few) other countries that don't have our ubiquitous weapon-toting culture, but it's ridiculous to think we can turn back the centuries of political and social evolution that made us the USA and them, say, Holland. I bet there are some nice old school puritans in Amsterdam pointing at us saying, "Look! They've criminalized drug use and prostitution. Why shouldn't it work here too?" Hmmm, I'm beginning to suspect that those peace-loving Netherlandish ways and their laissez-faire attitude about consensual "crime" are two sides of the same coin.
So now another crazy American asshole has killed a bunch of helpless people and he used a gun to do it. Certainly he could've used a bomb and probably he could've used a machete. He could've sped a truck (probably a Dodge Ram pickup) onto a crowded campus quad or piped carbon monoxide into his ex's dorm room. Chainsaw would've been very effective and inspired appropriate shock-and-awe! He could've killed a bunch of people in an Amsterdam coffee bar too. Serve those pothead pseudo-intellectuals right.
It has begun. Thanks to Cho Seung-Hui at VA Tech your politicians, spending your tax dollars, are already busily assigning funding to new, expensive, cronyist task forces, some shiny but tiny - relative to the problem - security technology, and a few lucky personnel (job ensured for life!) to look scary and inspect your national RealID. We need more funding! Now we need more than that! The people protecting won't even say please as they empty your wallet. It's for your own good. You asked for it. Begged for it!
Will any of this make you any safer? Will it even make you feel safer? Do you believe in the sunniest corner of your heart that more invasive policing and more, more, more funding will protect you from ... what? Has a policeman ever arrived at the scene of a crime perpetrated against you with any confidence-inspiring indication that justice will be served? I believe in the police, that they serve a crucial function maintaining civil society. I also believe they are stretched too thin by the overwhelming burden of - that term again - consensual crime they're expected to devote resources to. Those poor folks are so busy, most of us are embarrassed to call and report an actual property crime like a break-in, or vandalism. In Amsterdam, I wonder if the ho's can call the cops if a customer gets too rough? I bet they can!
How will you protect yourself? We are not children. The Muni/State/Fed are not our mommy and daddy. Heck, where were mom & dad when you were getting in trouble after school? They love you and they can't protect you (or protect the planet from you, as is the case for some of us.) The Fed doesn't love you. It loves the jobs and pork your tax dollars guarantee. In fact, the harried folks who created this country believed that they needed to be able to protect themselves from the very power we now frantically assign our policing bodies (so many more of them every day!)
Someone with a machete could be walking across the parking lot toward your office right this minute. You know it's true!
I own a gun. No guarantee that I'd have any luck with it, barring the element of surprising the hell out of an attacker, but I've done my homework and taken my personal defense classes and formed a plan. Eventually, I hope, the police will get here but that doesn't absolve me from responsibility for protecting myself and the people I love in the meantime by any means necessary. I sleep more comfortably at night for accepting this.
Use some of that tax "refund" to take a self-defense class. It's a much cheaper, much more proactive and - I suspect - a much more effective way to be a little safer than paying Sarah Palin's friends to sit in a meeting room collecting a state check only to tell you the solution to your protection problem is to give them more money.
Make sure your friends know you've got their back and don't let fear keep you from stepping up when danger is imminent. It's the only way to be sure justice has a chance, and that you don't live a life of regret wondering "What if I'd ..." In the end, we have to look out for ourselves and each other and that's how it's always been. I say this for myself, because that is the person I aspire to be rather than the ninny I am in high-tension situations.
Finally, if only Virginia Tech had adopted Penn Jillette's solution (quote below) to post-9/11 airline travel security hysteria we'd likely have had 25 or so fewer corpses on campus yesterday. Guns are not going away. Find a way to make them work for you rather than against you.
So now another crazy American asshole has killed a bunch of helpless people and he used a gun to do it. Certainly he could've used a bomb and probably he could've used a machete. He could've sped a truck (probably a Dodge Ram pickup) onto a crowded campus quad or piped carbon monoxide into his ex's dorm room. Chainsaw would've been very effective and inspired appropriate shock-and-awe! He could've killed a bunch of people in an Amsterdam coffee bar too. Serve those pothead pseudo-intellectuals right.
It has begun. Thanks to Cho Seung-Hui at VA Tech your politicians, spending your tax dollars, are already busily assigning funding to new, expensive, cronyist task forces, some shiny but tiny - relative to the problem - security technology, and a few lucky personnel (job ensured for life!) to look scary and inspect your national RealID. We need more funding! Now we need more than that! The people protecting won't even say please as they empty your wallet. It's for your own good. You asked for it. Begged for it!
Will any of this make you any safer? Will it even make you feel safer? Do you believe in the sunniest corner of your heart that more invasive policing and more, more, more funding will protect you from ... what? Has a policeman ever arrived at the scene of a crime perpetrated against you with any confidence-inspiring indication that justice will be served? I believe in the police, that they serve a crucial function maintaining civil society. I also believe they are stretched too thin by the overwhelming burden of - that term again - consensual crime they're expected to devote resources to. Those poor folks are so busy, most of us are embarrassed to call and report an actual property crime like a break-in, or vandalism. In Amsterdam, I wonder if the ho's can call the cops if a customer gets too rough? I bet they can!
How will you protect yourself? We are not children. The Muni/State/Fed are not our mommy and daddy. Heck, where were mom & dad when you were getting in trouble after school? They love you and they can't protect you (or protect the planet from you, as is the case for some of us.) The Fed doesn't love you. It loves the jobs and pork your tax dollars guarantee. In fact, the harried folks who created this country believed that they needed to be able to protect themselves from the very power we now frantically assign our policing bodies (so many more of them every day!)
Someone with a machete could be walking across the parking lot toward your office right this minute. You know it's true!
I own a gun. No guarantee that I'd have any luck with it, barring the element of surprising the hell out of an attacker, but I've done my homework and taken my personal defense classes and formed a plan. Eventually, I hope, the police will get here but that doesn't absolve me from responsibility for protecting myself and the people I love in the meantime by any means necessary. I sleep more comfortably at night for accepting this.
Use some of that tax "refund" to take a self-defense class. It's a much cheaper, much more proactive and - I suspect - a much more effective way to be a little safer than paying Sarah Palin's friends to sit in a meeting room collecting a state check only to tell you the solution to your protection problem is to give them more money.
Make sure your friends know you've got their back and don't let fear keep you from stepping up when danger is imminent. It's the only way to be sure justice has a chance, and that you don't live a life of regret wondering "What if I'd ..." In the end, we have to look out for ourselves and each other and that's how it's always been. I say this for myself, because that is the person I aspire to be rather than the ninny I am in high-tension situations.
Finally, if only Virginia Tech had adopted Penn Jillette's solution (quote below) to post-9/11 airline travel security hysteria we'd likely have had 25 or so fewer corpses on campus yesterday. Guns are not going away. Find a way to make them work for you rather than against you.
"What if, instead, we make the bad guys do the profiling? Get rid of all the showboat security. Try some freedom. Let anyone with a ticket get on the plane with anything he wants, and then make the terrorists decide which passengers to attack."
posted by EggOfTheDead at 9:56 AM
1 Comments:
You might be shocked by this, Eggy, but by and large, I agree with you. (I certainly agree with Penn about the airplane thing.)
I don't, nor will I ever, own a gun -- but it's a personal choice, much like the fact that I don't own a car, nor do I drive. Nor am I against the owning of guns (and it has nothing to do with accepting the Constitution or not) -- I believe that people can own whatever they want and use it how they see fit.
As far as I have heard, the VT killer went through the proper processes to obtain his weaponry. And it wouldn't matter if they had all of the security in the world to protect that campus; if someone truly wants to hurt someone or themselves, then they will find or invent a way to do it. Guns are really not the issue here; you are right, it could have been any number of weapons. The blood flow and death toll may have been considerably lower with a mere knife, but it still would have occurred all the same, if someone desired it to happen enough. And the killer would have gotten his point across -- if only in that twisted bugfucked head of his.
It may not be guns next time that a campus killing occurs, and there is nothing that we can do about it but let it happen. Just like anything in life, we are all at the mercy of the ticking timebombs in our skulls. The nice normal person next to us, who has never betrayed a single negative thought before, might be the next person to burst. Mankind is, by virtue of possession of the greatest weapon in the universe -- rational thought -- also prone to a bursting of the synapses, and doomed to its opposite -- irrational thought. Any one of us can snap at any moment, and there is nothing that no amount of security measures can do to stop that.
Guns are merely tools. It's the tools that use those tools improperly that make them dangerous.
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