First, a thought and a quiet prayer for the parents of the 20 children gunned down today. If I were one of them, I would feel like my world had just ended. I don't know how you console the inconsolable, but I can only hope that they each eventually find their own way through the pain.
But now we have to talk about why this keeps on happening. How many gun massacres have there been just since Aurora, less than five months ago? I've lost count.
You know, I'm no gun expert, but surely there have to be ways to reduce the amount of carnage one can do with guns in the space of a few minutes, that wouldn't involve taking away anyone's gun, and wouldn't make it more difficult to defend oneself from the marauding horde that gun nuts are always secretly hoping will show up at the doors of their suburban split-levels. (And when no gangbangers show up, they kill a trick-or-treater or something.)
Maybe reduce the capacity of a semi-automatic's clip?* No, not even the slightest imposition on gun rights is acceptable to the gun crowd, no matter how many people have to die as a result. In order that their gun rights remain uninfringed, of course, the unlimited right of every crazy person ready to go postal to obtain the latest and greatest in semi-automatic technology must also be preserved.
Their 'rights' to have no restrictions at all on the characteristics of the guns they own are more important, in their eyes, than the right that the victims of a shooting like today's had to keep on living. That's the sort of everyday amorality and sociopathy that ensures that when someone flips out completely, he can take a whole batch of people with him.
I understand that there are total crazies in this world. I don't understand the moral calculus of people who think the lives of the total crazies' victims are less important than the least imposition on the sort of guns they can carry. I guess this is what the banality of evil looks like: tens of millions of people who put the slightest imposition on what they perceive as their rights ahead of the lives of thousands of their fellow citizens.
I don't understand their moral calculus, but I'm done with it. Fuck 'em.
*What I've heard today is that since it only takes a second to change an ammo clip, that wouldn't do any good anyway. Well, fuck, can't we try? No, we can't, they say. Not that I buy their argument anyway: today's killer shot 26 people at that elementary school. Suppose there were a max of 6 bullets in a clip: he'd be on his fifth clip by the time he was done. What's he going to do, juggle his reserve clips while he shoots? If not, he's got to fumble for them as he pulls them out of his pocket, his tote bag, whatever, unless he's the most dextrous man in the world. Every little bit helps - or would, if the gun nuts of America were doing their damnedest to block efforts at massacre prevention.