Gun Crazy

I sometimes hear hardcore right-wingers crow about their guns, especially when they're drinking. Gun madness grips the people and poisons public living. People seek retreat behind closed gates, closed doors, high walls. The relationship of Americans with fast cars, alcohol and guns is a sick one. What is the solution? There may not be an easy solution. Perhaps victims of gun violence should seek vendetta, as was the ancient practice, and when a mad person kills their loved one, seek out the mad person's family--or tribe--and take blood price. That sort of cycle would grip the American public's imagination in a powerful way. Once the public perceives interwoven chains of blood vendettas causing public shootings, not just once a week, but multiple times daily, that is when America would wake up and smell the coffee, observe it is bitter, and throw it out with the guns.

The trouble with guns is they offer an "easy out" to the mad Desperados of the world, those in blackest despair and depression, who have given up on life and have no love in their soul for anyone or anything in this world and crave only death. The only glimmer of desire left in their vapid souls is a desire to cause pain and suffering. They are possessed by demons, indeed. They run amok, let the demon have full control. Depriving such fools of guns would not eliminate their threat, by any means, and no one should suppose that would be the case. It would however raise the bar, so that a fool would be required to put on his thinking cap (I use the masculine pronoun, because so often, the mad shooter is male) and exert courage, creativity or resoucefulness, all of which tend to be in short supply in such ignoramuses. Craven cowards lacking any imagination, mad shooters gone amok can scarcely reason their way out of a box, let alone wield a melee weapon in close quarters or aim a bow. A fit, able-bodied person would have better odds at survival against that sort of threat. Pointing and shooting a gun requires so little skill and so little will, and that is why it is perceived to be a tool of evil. Good men hate guns, but keep them handy in order to protect others from evil men. Evil men love guns and fill their minds with thoughts of killing.