Now that a crazed gunman has slaughtered 20 white kids in an upscale Connecticut suburb where a lot of media live, the gun lobby is ready to negotiate gun control legislation. But they’re not offering much.
Come Back When There’s Video
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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We’ve been here before. This is merely the domestic-only version of TSA and its idiotic policies.
Whether it’s terrorists or shooters, we expend almost no effort, expense or thought on trying to understand their motivations. For the most part, those in power (i.e., those who represent the majority), do not accept the idea that a terrorist or a shooter might have a backstory. Tommy Terrorist isn’t flying a plane into a skyscraper because he “hates our freedoms.” Someone shooting up a school or a movie theater took a long, long time to reach that point.
And because our leadership doesn’t take an honest look at the problem, it keeps not coming up with a solution. We can outlaw every single gun, some Angry Young Man will simply come along with another method of killing multiple people on a single try. We can outlaw it all, guns, chainsaws, nail guns, gasoline, school buses that can drive up onto a curb where people are standing, etc., and someone will simply start dropping refrigerators off roofs.
The shooters aren’t an aberration; they’re what’s to be expected from our society. Violent video games didn’t do it, sugary junk food isn’t the cause, it’s a great big ball of bad, stupid decisions made by generations of politicians put into place by a sheep-populace.
I agree Alex – except my opinion is that those in power no longer represent the majority on many important issues, and haven’t for a long time. Those in power depend on staying in control exactly because the majority is a sheep-populace and is unable to “see” the changes that have slowly occurred around them. The sheep will remain sheep until things get bad enough for most of them – and this is deterred by the occassional scraps they are tossed, and the miinformation they are constantly fed.
Now that drones will soon be available to all and sundry, perhaps the NRA would be willing to make a deal ? After all, from what I understand, videos are taken of the targets, who, of course, automatically become «terrorists» upon being killed (not even so much as a Mormon baptism is required). What’s a 30-round clip against that ?…
Henri
Rikster makes an excellent point. I wonder what OWS could have accomplished if they’d all been handed assignments: writing letters, canvassing neighborhoods to educate potential voters, etc. instead of being told to sit on their asses in a park and play at Carnivale parading.