BY MIKE INGLES
Problem: People, a great many people, some only 6-years-old, are being massacred by unstable folks with access to semi-automatic weapons.
Solution: The senate has agreed to close the loophole allowing sane people who want to own guns to register their automatic weapons.
Am I the only one in America that sees a disconnect here? I mean how does registering a weapon, that ultimately falls into the hands of a lizard king, going to save a child in a quiet schoolhouse?
All those folks with worms in their brains, and some who are just now nurturing a budding lizard king in their cerebral cortex, don’t know right from wrong; don’t know, semi-automatic from automatic; don’t know, machine gun from 30-in-the-clip—are off their meds, only for a day or so. Didn’t mean to shoot the congresswoman, or the six-year-old budding soccer player, or the grad student writing his thesis in American Literature on “The Twilight Zone.”
Yesterday, a young man stabbed 14 people on a Texas campus. He said that he’s always wanted to stab people, since he was about 8-years-old. The lizard king constantly worms its way around up there in all that gray matter until an opportunity presents itself. Meantime, MSNBC is slobbering all over itself because two pathological, gun-toting, cowboys from West Virginia and Pennsylvania shake hands and say—yep, the time has come for real gun control, they’ll have to register the guns they buy at a gun show. But they can still give the weapon away to, oh, I don’t know, maybe a nephew with a slight twitch?
If Rod Sterling were alive, he could write a hell of a spooky story about a twelve-year-old boy with a twitch, a toy lizard and a key to a locked weapons closet. Not me—I write only non-fiction.
And, the truth is, the actual fact is, that politicians and lobbyists for the NRA are whistling past the graveyard. They fully realize that their task is not to write legislation that might protect innocent people from lizard king assassinations but to calm the public with the fiction that they have a solution to the problem. Their job is to convince us cows that they are doing something that will make a difference. All this posturing, all this fainting, all this exasperating deep-breathing done in front of cameras allows the New Yorker to examine idiotic concepts like the politics of shame. These guys are not ashamed—they’re proud of the way the can dupe the public. Senators Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey are profiles in jelly. Both men were just elected to senate seats and so have almost six-years to find their back way into the good graces of the nutty public whom they represent. It was no accident that these two models of blabber were selected by the back-room boys to reach this dramatic compromise.
That’s compromise as in two sides agreeing in principle. This exercise was simply the same sides agreeing to the least they could possibly do.
Problem: Too many guns being fired by folks with pet lizards.
Solution: Stop the proliferation of weapons and control mental illness.
Not easy tasks. But can be done. But first the political will must be marshalled and folks need to see through the status quo. But folks won’t. They won’t because people in America lead busy lives and they figure people who are a lot smarter than them, who they trust to do the right thing, will stop the madness of murdering school children in Ohio and Illinois and Connecticut and Arizona and wherever the lizard king strikes next.
Fourteen people were stabbed yesterday on a campus in AMERICA. The lizard king is alive and well.
Think I’ll start writing fiction.
MIKE INGLES is getting real mad some place in Ohio.