Saturday, July 28, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Guns and Roses
Many many dozens of moons ago an immigrant worker wearing a younger man's clothes asked a naive question in the then very new corporate electronic discussion forum: why does someone who is not a law enforcement officer need to own a gun?. Another young man across the continent from Pensylvannia thundered back, o' my cold dead fingers. Now wearing more mature clothes and perhaps a bit more wizened and understanding the settler ethos which has shaped the genes of a nation and its people, I do get one point, that if a bad person wants to kill he can do so with or without a gun. But I am still perplexed, and now living in crowded suburbs of New York do wonder still why would anyone who is not into law enforcement or army want to own assault weapons? What freedom? Who could they protect? The senselessness of it all is mind boggling, unless one is fatalistic and believes that if a bad thing is going to happen to you it will happen with or without assault rifles.
While the monsters of Columbine, Aurora, Virginia keeping popping up now and then I have yet to witness any sensible news stories depicting how owning a gun helped a good person protect themselves against a bad person. Guns do not cause or prevent killings. Killing existed long before guns. Guns do make them more detached, clinical, cold blooded, senseless, horrendous, game-like, unhinged from reason and sanity. There are not many mountain frontiers left to be settled in this land for the coming generations. What is left to conquer and suppress are our random demons.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Thursday, July 12, 2012
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