This has been a horrific week here in the brave new state of Michissippi (if you are even a bit left of center, I’m sure others are whooping it up in celebration — “protecting” women, giving workers “choices” yada yada, let’s throw the misogynist bums out!). Alas, I think Connecticut has us beat. I actually think The Onion says it best. I don’t follow The Onion, I ran across this link on Twitter. I know The Onion is supposed to be satirical. I detect just the barest whiff of satire in this article. It describes exactly how I feel. I have no words… … …

I have said before that I am not a gun control advocate. In general, that is. I will never purposely go out and purchase a gun and I am afraid to shoot one. Heck, the noise alone is enough to scare me off. That said, I have lived my entire life with benign gun owners — guys who shoot at targets and old logs back in the swamp and stuff like that. Once, when a serial bludgeoner was roaming my neighborhood (some of his [female] victims died, some did not, he didn’t seem to care one way or another), I told a neighbor that, no I wasn’t afraid to walk alone (in the middle of the day, no less!) but that I thought it might be cool to teach every woman in the city how to use a damn gun and station them at the entrances to each woods. I was ANGRY! I want to be able to walk in my neighborhood without worrying about some deranged person out bludgeoning women at random. Of course it was a pipe dream and I still don’t own a gun. Although I suppose I have inherited a few. Maybe I could store them next to the oatmeal… … … When you think about it, guns are pretty safe here with me, since I have no interest in shooting them… … …

That said, I think that it *is* time to have a discussion about some of these blasted automatic weapons… … … This is happening too frequently and it seems impossible to predict who is gonna go nuts or when or why. If I have it right, the Aurora shooter tried to warn someone that he was struggling and the warning went unheeded… … … It has to be harder to buy these fancy automatic guns. A whole roomful of kindergartners? Whaaaa??? A Twitter acquaintance has been retweeting posts from a mom whose relative has been reunited with two of her children. No one will tell her where the third is… … …

And God? Everywhere everywhere everywhere on facebook, people are posting hastily photoshopped memes about praying for the victims. Okay, if you are religious and praying to God makes you feel better about this, more power to you. If religion provides some relief to those whose lives have been horrifically changed forever, may their God bless them. I mean that. But I am a lifelong agnostic and it all leaves me a little cold. Does God really think it’s okay for a young man, barely more than a child himself, to shoot a room full of five-year-olds? When I was a small child asking questions about God and why this or that could happen, Sunday School teachers always saccharinely replied, “It’s all part of God’s plan.” Whose plan? What plan? (Where the hell did I dine?) How is “God” going to help here? Where was God when the shooter walked into that classroom? Taking a coffee break? Watching football? Visiting the outhouse? Sorry. I just can’t wrap my brain around this and I don’t see how a bunch of random strangers on facebook re-posting religious photo-memes can possibly help… … …

I am babbling but no more than all of the news feeds I read today. Changing numbers of dead people. Changing numbers of shooters. A dead father [brother?] in a different town? Missing girlfriend? Pictures of men with guns everywhere [police, of course] His mother was a teacher at the school? And he killed her too? (And all those kindergartners?) His mother owned the guns? A link to a facebook profile of the killer? Or not? Or not the killer but his brother? A man in camo being hauled out of the school by the police yelling to the crowd that he didn’t do it? What is the real story? It’s been hours since I have checked news. Who knows what the story has turned into now… … …

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2012 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.