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. . .

That was fast

I couldn't help but notice just how fast law enforcement slapped a terrorism label on that shooting in Tennessee.The news had just broken, only an hour or two had passed since the first reports came out, and it was terrorism. All it apparently took was learning the shooter had an Arabic name and, bang, instant terrorism case. Now they're scrambling to find some connection, any connection, with organizations such as ISIS or Al Qaeda. After all, a young man who was born in Kuwait and who still has relatives in the Middle East couldn't possibly make trips back to Kuwait for something as mundane as visiting his grandparents, could he? His travels must have been for nefarious purposes.

Let me make one thing clear -- I'm not saying those potentially nefarious reasons do not exist. Given all the reasons American foreign policy has given for Arabs to hate the United States in general and the U.S. military in particular, it is possible a connection to a formal terrorist organization will be found. What I am bothered by is the instant rush to judgement, especially in contrast to the Dylann Roof case. Roof frequented white supremacist sites on-line, clearly supported white supremacist organizations, and shot 9 people because he wanted to start a race war. . . but is he a terrorist? Law enforcement is still hemming and hawing about that one. Apparently terrorism can only be terrorism if it's foreign, not home grown.

Of course, by running around blathering about terrorism and foreign travel, everyone is conveniently distracted from asking questions like, "Just how did a guy with an Arabic name manage to acquire multiple weapons?" Then again, if those questions do start getting asked, the NRA will be on the scene pretty fast to explain why it's way, way more important why anyone and everyone should be allowed to buy whatever gun they want without anyone ever questioning it than it is to prevent more people from getting shot.  

I am, incidentally, pretty confident that if the investigation reveals the shooting occurred for purely personal reasons, like if the shooter was pissed that one of the recruiters had rejected him for enlistment or he had mental health issues, we'll never hear about it on mainstream media.

A small digression that illustrates just how bad things have gotten in this country when it comes to random gun violence and mass shootings: I couldn't remember how to spell Dylann Root's name (one "n" or two?) so I Googled "Charlestown shooting." Obviously, I also couldn't remember how to spell Charleston. Anyway, I got a long string of hits for recent shootings in assorted Charlestowns around the country: West Virginia, Massachusetts, and a couple others. And my co-workers in Atlanta wondered why I wanted to retire to the middle of nowhere. . .

I may have spotted a unicorn

It's possible we Michiganders have that rarest of political critters, a semi-sane Republican, down in Lansing. Governor Rick Snyder vetoed a bill that would have allowed persons convicted of domestic violence to obtain concealed carry weapons permits. The Michigan state senate and legislature both have Republican majorities; the bill had passed easily, although there had been the usual amount of bloviating about how putting concealed weapons into the hands of people who had already shown they thought violence was a good way to solve problems was actually a good way to make everyone safer.

Made perfect sense to me -- after all, doesn't every victim of violence want to be reassured that, hey,you know that borderline psychotic you had to get a restraining order against? The crazy lady who tried to beat you to death with a frying pan or the flaming asshole who put you in the hospital with broken ribs? Well, good news. Next time they'll be able to make it fast and just shoot you. Yeah, your odds of survival just went down, but look on the bright side. At least it'll be quick.

I do not know what effect, if any, Michigan's current law regarding gun ownership and domestic violence may or may not have had on domestic violence in general in the state. I do have anecdotal evidence that it has caused a few people to think twice when they've been in volatile relationships, but we all know that the plural of anecdote is not data. It has always struck me as being a common sense measure, though. After all, if you can't be trusted to be in an intimate relationship with another person without resorting to violence, why on earth should anyone believe you're mentally stable enough to be trusted with a gun?

Rick Snyder is definitely not one of my favorite people, but he does seem to have a pragmatic streak. Every so often he does somethng that actually makes sense. Then again, at this point in his political career he can afford to. He was re-elected to a second term in November. It's also his last term as Michigan sets a two-term limit on its governors.

Thinking about guns

but am too depressed to string together anything coherent.

Is the paradigm shifting?

Is the paradigm shifting? It's been over a month since the massacre at the Newtown elementary school, and the media is still paying attention to guns and gun control. Given that the main stream media usually have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to any one issue, it's a bit odd to see them still talking about "old news."

Even more intriguing, they seem to be playing up the number of incidents highlighting gun owners being idiots. I've noticed an unusually high number of stories describing stupid human tricks that come close to qualifying as Darwin Award nominees except no one has died. You know, gun owners shooting themselves in the hand or other body parts, gun owners reporting weapons missing and then finding the lost Glock hiding in the sofa cushions in their living room, and so on. One article mentioned an idiot who lost a loaded handgun in a movie theater. He apparently had it so poorly secured that it fell out of the holster when he shifted position in his seat. You've got to be pretty damn incompetent to manage to lose a 9 mm Beretta and not notice it's gone until the following day.

Some of these incidents have involved not just any ordinary gun owner, but gun dealers. Gun dealers are supposed to be experts, the guys who really know their stuff around weaponry. So what does it say when gun dealers start accidentally shooting themselves? It's all truly stupid stuff, all of which lends itself to a subtle undermining of the gun owners' preferred self-image, i.e., a competent, responsible modern day version of Marshall Will Kane preparing for his or her personal version of High Noon. You can talk all you want about "responsible gun owners" but when the news media keeps pointing out fools who do stuff you wouldn't think was physically possible -- how the heck can anyone shoot themselves in the hand? Who on earth holds any weapon with one hand covering the end of the barrel?! That's when the collective image of gun owners starts to slide from Marshall Matt Dillon to somewhere in the general vicinity of Festus Hagin's mule.

So what does all this imply? I'm hoping it means the political power of the gun lobby is eroding. When the public starts to mock gun owners instead of kowtowing to them, one can hope it means a paradigm is shifting.

I love irony

Interesting article in today's Washington Post

Packing Protection or Packing Suicide Risk?

It appears that the folks who are so insistent on owning guns for self-defense are more likely to shoot themselves than they are to use their weaponry against intruders or muggers.

Irony? Poetic justice? Instant karma? Or all three?

Explain to me again why gun ownership is a good idea

Local gun nuts are doing the happy dance because Georgia's new concealed carry law went into effect yesterday. I am not as sanguine.

Case in point:

Builder faces murder case:
Victim mistaken for copper thief, says Coweta sheriff.
Defense attorney says suspect didn't mean to shoot.

Just how stupid does a person have to be in order to not recognize his own subcontractors? And whatever happened to the idea of calling the cops if you think you're seeing a burglary in progress?

I'm not really in the mood to argue the Second Amendment. I do, however, think the key word might be "well regulated." I'd like to see that interpreted as "You want to own a gun, first prove you're not an idiot." I.e., be willing to sit through a waiting period and submit to a background check, take gun safety classes, and generally demonstrate you're a rational adult. If the Supreme Court is willing to concede that government has the right to keep guns away from criminals and the insane, I surely don't see anything wrong with trying to keep them out of the hands of the terminally stupid, too.

Update: a link suggested by Mathman: "A Tale of Two Amendments" by Matty Boy over at Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do. It got me to thinking that maybe the key to gun ownership should be being required to prove you're qualified to be a member of that "well-regulated militia." Army recruiters reject would-be enlistees every day; if someone isn't qualified to serve in the regular military, why should he or she be allowed to possess a private arsenal?