Get your geek on.
You ever try drinking Dom through a crazy straw? It’s damned near impossible. It’s so effervescent that you get nothing but foam. Not that that stopped us from doing it, I’m just saying. I dropped the crazy straw in and it spouted up like a volcano in my hand. That was our first sign there was gonna be trouble.
Every few years there’s a story in the news about a kid in Florida being eaten by an alligator, and every few years it occurs to me that maybe people should stop taking children to a sweltering, primordial swamp filled with hungry, man-eating dragon lizards.
I am so sick of hearing about souls and spirits and prayers and the rest of this nonsense people are so quick to spout after a mass murder. Fuck your soul, and fuck your prayers. People parade those terms around for one simple reason: they’re immeasurable. They’re unquantifiable, so you can say whatever you want about them, because it’s fucking meaningless.
You, in fact, CAN measure some things, like gun violence statistics. And it turns out we should be worried about the tools of mass shootings, because the tools are the problem. Before the NRA and other groups like them shut down government sponsored gun violence research in the mid 1990s, it was pretty much conclusively shown that having a gun in your home tripled the possibility that you were going to be involved in gun violence. And the reason is very simple: guns are easy to use. That’s really what it comes down to. They are a quick and convenient way to hurt someone else or yourself (suicide rates are way higher for gun owners), and the convenience of being able to pull the trigger vs. using a knife or some other weapon meant that, in times of anger and emotional desperation, people were less likely to think twice about using it.
If this cocksucker didn’t have legal, easy access to a military grade weapon – and I don’t want to hear any bullshit about it being a “civilian model,” because that is a bullshit weasel word marketing term – there is no way he could have managed to shoot this many people. This was done because it was convenient to do so. Building a bomb is tricky and dangerous. Not everyone can do it. But even the dumbest asshole can pick up a gun and pull the trigger. So, yes, I think we very much goddamned well CAN demonize the weapon. Because without the weapon this person could not so easily have slaughtered so many other human beings.
What the shit, man??? When the hell did they take down the Young & Bertke tin man pipe robot guy sign thing?!?
“Nobody knows anything. We’ll take this leap and we’ll see. We’ll jump, and we’ll see. That’s life.”