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Posts Tagged ‘shooting’

When Covid Wanes, Guns Remain

Posted in Guns, tagged , , , , , on March 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Eight people are gone in Georgia, six of them Asian women. We should talk about the rise in Asian-American hate crimes. We should talk about how women have been forced to define their freedom to speak, to move, to even live according to the violent and uncontrolled sexual impulses of men. The horror of this mass murder is worse because of its complication: there’s a lot to unpack, and I don’t want to see any of the many problems here obscured by one of the others.

So we shouldn’t let it all overshadow the gun talk we still need to be having. It always feels pointless to try to explain the link between murder weapons and toxic masculinity to people. But a gun gives a psychologically wounded man a feeling of agency. “I’d just like to try to see somebody break into my house.” How many people have you known who’ve said that? Guess what: It’s wrong. Why? It’s not the statement of a prudent person who wants to defend himself. It’s the statement of somebody practicing homicidal ideation. It’s someone saying that “I have the power to shoot someone in the back from across the street, and instead of stepping back and thinking about the awful responsibility of that fact, I am dreaming of how I might bring that vision about.” This kind of person is not thinking of rules of engagement. This person is not thinking of how the duty to retreat might make a situation better. This person has tied his esteem and existential pride to facing down a risky outcome in which he hopes to win but seldom does in reality.

We shouldn’t be surprised when people suddenly do bring their sordid vision of personal power about. I grew up in a house with many guns. I was taught how to fire them and how to safely use them by someone who thought he was responsible. He was. Until he wasn’t. When he was angry or afraid, he pulled out his guns and in at least two situations created unnecessary danger for those around him. I knew as a kid (without having the words for it yet) that it was ridiculous to call a gun a defense weapon. How in actual situations it was highly unlikely I was going to be even have time to point it at someone with intent to kill if necessary. It’s very seldom going to happen in the fast-moving arenas where violence happens, always with speed far beyond the fantasies of our reflexes. Being able to kill somebody by shooting them in the back from 100 yards is the essential talent of a firearm, and it does not make you a defender to own one. There is nothing inherently defensive about being able to heave a projectile through space faster than anybody can react.

Does having a gun make a lot of people feel safe? Sure. Does it really make them safe? Not according to physics or statistics. (We can save the two flawed or fraudulent studies arguing for the regularity of successful gun defenses. Those studies are ridiculous on their face and have been debunked repeatedly.) If you think of a gun as a defense weapon–even though it has no shield and no way to disperse incoming projectiles–it’s not because you’ve ever really thought about the physics of the idea but because the social conditioning rampant among toxic American fathers has led you to suspend your common sense.

So our gun laws in many states are designed with the pitiably incomplete idea that a violent people will use violence to dampen their own violent tendencies. It’s actually what I like to call a “Vote for the Worst” scheme: Our laws don’t reward or protect responsible gun owners (as advocates insist they do). Instead, weak gun laws ironically protect the least responsible, the ones with the most likelihood of acting out of passion or anger. We give speed to cretins. We pray for reflexes among victims. And we end up giving killers like the shooter in Georgia a fair shot at rearranging the world according to his fantasy of perfection. It requires our blood to work.

The coronavirus sent everybody home, sent everybody into a panic, sent everybody out to buy guns. More guns will equal more violence. There is nothing preventative about a murder weapon. That’s the world that’s been inflicted on us, those with families whom we love, the world all of us must have venture out in–leaving one spiritual coma and entering another.

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Devastated

Posted in Life, tagged , , , on December 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I haven’t posted recently, and don’t really want to post about the Newtown, Conn. shootings today, in which 20 elementary school children were massacred by a gunman while they were trapped in their classroom (along with seven adults). But I also think silence has its own kind of disrespect. So I’ll say only that I’ve been too sick in my stomach today to want to put my feelings into words. It’s something fatherhood has done to me–made me feel protective of every person’s children, since mine could have just as easily been harmed as theirs. To open yourself up to that kind of love for a being, to feel protective of that being, responsible for that being, and know that it’s possible he or she can be taken away from you in a meaningless burst of violence, is almost impossible to reconcile to logic. It makes you want to shut down, give up, go away. Take your child and run and hide.

I am being told that to politicize this patently political problem today is unseemly. That is the conspicuous pile of bullshit being spread by a certain rights lobby, whose defensive posture and rhetoric says more than I ever could about them. I could go on for pages about that. But lucky for them I don’t feel like it. I feel only like being with my small, hopeful, innocent son, holding him, watching over him and spending the next few days trying to remind myself that my plan was to bring him into a good world.  Would that it were always true.

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Friends Knew Shooter Was A Psycho

Posted in Satire, Society, tagged , , on January 31, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Friends of a man accused of shooting dozens at a convenience store in Friarsburg, North Dakota saw it coming a mile away, they said Thursday.

Brad James Cheltenham, a part-time janitor and full-time Illuminati and CIA history buff, was arrested last Wednesday after shooting at 36 customers at the Wiggle Pig bodega, a rampage that ended in the parking lot after police disabled Cheltenham with a shot to the leg.

“No surprise here,” says Cheltenham’s best friend Stu Ryerson. “Brad’s a friggin’ nut. He used to stand in my driveway and yell word salad at me–that I was a devil pinko with a bifurcated tail. I put up with it because he was good at basketball.”

Cheltenham’s one-time possible girlfriend also had long anticipated the day that she would see the man she dated for five hours at a Sonic drive-in being dragged across America’s TV screens and accused of a mass shooting as cops sprayed grapeshot at him and gas spewed all over the ground.

“File this under ‘Totally expected,'” she said. “I remember when I first met him at the airport. He had screamed at the desk clerk that he was going to miss his connecting flight, and what should have been grumbling turned into something like a grand mal seizure and he took a swing at the poor woman and pretty soon he was in the anti-terrorist holding tank. Dunno why I agreed to go on a date with him. He knew a lot about Dostoevsky.”

Cheltenham grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis and tried to attend community college there but was thrown out because “everybody knew the kid was going to go postal someday,” said the college’s vice provost, Derek Jamesian. “We got our new security cameras just for him.”

Cheltenham’s mother ran a small book store in Fargo and his father was a retired doctor who sold medical supplies.

“Yep, we knew he’d do this someday,” his now remarried mother Iris Flotsky said. “I love my son, but when you look in his eyes for two seconds, you just realize he was born without a soul. I wish you could find that out on an amniocentesis, but you can’t.”

His father, Joe P. Cheltenham, agreed: “I’d like to tell you it was his upbringing, but really the kid was sui generis, neither fish nor fowl, straight from the depths of hell Belial and Molloch wrapped into one. I think after talking to Brad for a few minutes, you might let us off the hook.”

The alleged shooter says he went on his rampage to alert people to the control government has on sans serif fonts in textbooks and also because a store clerk disrespected him a long time ago.

Friend Blake McNulty remembers going to a theme park with Cheltenham once and turned in shock when his friend started screaming at a funfair employee over how much each dart cost at the “Balloon and Dart” game.

“Brad started screeching that the game ‘was rig’ and then stuff started coming out of his mouth, and I think a bit of pus from his ears. Later he said he was fine, he was just in a bad mood right then.”

Cheltenham himself said after the shooting, “You are all very into yourselves and everything is about you. I will show you how things are also about me. Bozzle bozzle bozzle bozzle.”

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Sarah Palin Edits Her Arizona Speech After Reading Wikipedia

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on January 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

http://player.vimeo.com/video/18698532

Sarah Palin: “America’s Enduring Strength” from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

Sarah Palin released a video today in which she talked about the shootings in Arizona. She would like to go back and edit some of her language now that she realizes what some phrases actually mean.

“Like millions of Americans, I was learned of the tragic events that unfolded in Arizona on Saturday. I could not understand why a deranged man would try to attack those showing their peaceful right to assemble and to exchange ideas in our vibrant country. But how sadly ironic it was to see later that people were trying to apportion blame to those other than the law breaker. Dare we call this kind of talk a blood libel dirty smear?

Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own and we should not stand still while journalists and pundits manufacture a pogrom backlash against those who debate passionately. Why, the attitude among the media to patriotic right wing talk radio hosts this week was  a Holocaust an outrage. A real genocide. Real dirty pool. As Americans rallied to express their opinions in a beautiful moment of inspiring debate that so defines our country, a mad man let loose with a mindless rampage. But rather than unite together in a time of common humanity, we let the media create a Shoah horrible controversy.

It is important for us to respect our differences with each other and strive for a better country. And for us instead to point fingers at each other is a horrible final solution mistake. Ronald Reagan said that blame for monstrous acts should stop with the monster. I agree with that. Let not the vibrant debate in our country be muffled by those who would seek to tear us apart.We cannot abide by these volkisch partisan sentiments. It will end in a real Dreyfus Affair moral travesty. Or a Farhud war of words.

Sometimes political parties win and sometimes they lose, and we do no favor to the political process by acting like antisemitic silly Nazis schoolchildren prosecuting a kristallnacht pitching hissy fits. The only thing we have to fear is Judeophobia fear itself.

Thank you, and God bless America”

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