It's time for some paranoid dreams to come true

Enough is enough. When it reaches the point where a person's only reaction to news of yet another mass shooting is to wonder wearily "where is it this time?" the time has come to make all the ammosexual paranoid fantasies come true. As long as the gun nuts are screaming that Obama's going to come for guns, how about if Obama actually does go after their guns? It's time to start focusing on that phrase in the Second Amendment everyone conveniently ignores: "A well-regulated militia." Fine. Let's start regulating it.

Let's institute the Swiss model: you want to own a gun? Fine. First you get conscripted into the militia where you'll get thoroughly trained in how to actually use a gun. The combination of mandatory military service and actual firearms training will do two things: it'll eliminate a huge number of accidental shootings because people won't be quite as likely to leave firearms unsecured (the death rate from toddlers shooting people should drop considerably) and military psychological screening might reduce the number of  truly dumb fuck Ted Nugent wannabes and borderline paranoid schizophrenics from the gun ownership pool. Because let's face it -- anyone who thinks they need to own a gun so they can personally overthrow a tyrannical government is not playing with a full deck to begin with.

What if you don't fall into the right age bracket for military service? Then you're either too young to responsibly own a gun, or you're old enough to have figured out that you don't really need a penis extender that badly. If you want a long gun for hunting, go through mandatory training and you can have one. Don't want to do the mandatory training? Fine, invest in a bow and arrows. Bow hunting's more of a challenge anyway. 

Although I don't know if anything would really help at this point. Part of me would like to see SWAT teams going door to door and just confiscating anything they find that's more than a single shot firearm. Another part says it doesn't matter what we do. We've become a culture that is so blase about senseless gun violence that we no longer blink an eye over incidents like a Waffle House waitress getting shot and killed by a customer when she told him the restaurant was nonsmoking (it happened in Mississippi recently) or some nut in Texas shooting someone for having the nerve to park on the street in front of the shooter's house (also in the news in the past week). When we've got people who think it's fine to kill people over petty annoyances, are we even salvageable as a society? I'm not sure. How do you turn around a culture that thinks violence is the solution for every problem? We may have gone so far down the road to a Mad Max future there's no turning back.

That said, I fear that because the latest mass shooting involved a man and woman with Arab names, the only thing that's going to result from it is more hate directed towards anyone Muslim, whatever the suspects' motives may have been. The little bit that's been on the news about the people involved makes it sound more like good old-fashioned American workplace violence (the shooter killed co-workers at a holiday party) than anything ideologically driven, but you never know. . .