"I hope we don’t try to use this as an excuse to go and to take away guns."
– Dan Quayle, on the massacre.
Don’t worry, Dan ol’ man. They won’t succeed. Everybody knows the Colorado school massacre had nothing to do with guns. Or that any cash-flush cretin can buy any instrument of death he wants.
Guns didn’t kill the 12 teenagers and a teacher who a day later were still lying stiff in their blood and bodily fluids while cops tried to check their corpses for booby traps.
No. Their skulls and chests had been shattered by bullets, yes, and the two shooters, in pale homage to Adolf Hitler, had blown their own brains out.
But firearms are our friends. That distinguished pro wrestler turned governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, said it best. What the murders proved, that political philosopher in a feather boa said, was that we need more "conceal and carry" permits. "Had there been someone who was armed, in this particular situation, in my opinion, it may have stabilized." Unfortunately, the man who stood a fair chance of becoming the patron saint of morons everywhere later sold out to the spineless.
By week’s end, bolt-action Jesse was whining he hadn’t really meant it. "I believe that, except for uniformed police officers, a school is no place for weapons, and that the carrying of concealed weapons in schools is not an answer."
What a wimp! Well, there goes his political future. Everybody knows that our founding fathers, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Jesus H. Christ wanted any maniac to be able to buy any form, type and quantity of murder machine he could afford.
Fortunately, the last bastion of our rights and freedoms, the Neurotic Rifle Association, is on the job. Bill Dietrick, a particularly rabid NRA member from Colorado, was really incensed after the high school massacre. For one thing, it torpedoed three bills he had lobbied hard for. All would have considerably advanced the culture of death. One would have made it impossible to file local lawsuits against gun manufacturers. The others would have made it much easier to kill with a gun by loosening restrictions on concealed weapons permits and pre-empting any sane local ordinances on firearms.
Now, thanks to Columbine, those laws are in the toilet, at least for now. Even worse, the NRA, three-day national meeting in Denver now seems likely to be essentially canceled. "We don’t want you here," said the mayor, Wellington Webb.
That shook the sickos at Ricochet Central; they’re not used to having politicians stand up to them. Cornered, the rats fought back. "We must stand in somber but unshakable unity, even in this time of anguish," Charlton Heston, the NRA’s figurehead president, told members in a letter that revealed that he had, indeed, taken one too many falls from his chariot while filming Ben-Hur. Back on the ground in Colorado, Dietrick, probably frustrated at the wimpiness of his leadership, took no prisoners.
Sticking to his guns, he proclaimed that what was needed in Columbine was more of them.
"When you make places like schools off-limits to the honest (gun-carrying) people, those who have gone through the background checks ... you create a killing ground for those who are inclined to do so," he said defiantly.
Well, that’s enough time in cloud-cuckoo-land.
Nobody wants to face the truth, which is that we are a deeply sick society, as attached to our instruments of death as a brain-damaged baby to its pacifier.
Thanks to our national fixation, and to the lying and lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association, we have been sold an enormous lie, i.e. that the Constitution gives us a sacred right to have all the firepower we want.
(This is based on a misinterpretation of the most outdated part of that document, the Second Amendment, which essentially says we may need a volunteer army.)
Thanks to that confusion, two sick puppies pretending in 1999 to be Gestapo thugs, circa 1939, could easily get two sawed-off shotguns, a semiautomatic rifle and pistol, and then bring them, along with many homemade bombs, into their school.
Undoubtedly old Tom, the rent-a-cop guard with a pistol, could have "neutralized" that situation lickety-split ... but let’s get real.
Either we do something about guns, or we’ll have a lot more of this.
First, we have to do something about the NRA, and we can start by treating it, and its members, as the social lepers they should be. They should be ostracized, ridiculed, held up to contempt, as if they were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, they have caused a lot more deaths in recent years than the moribund bedsheet society.
Decent folks may then leave the NRA, and the fanatics left will find their influence steadily diminished, until someday Congress may have the ability and political will at last to do something concrete to lessen the ability of a child to get an assault rifle.
For it really is them, or us. Dan Quayle, by the way, disagrees.
What’s more, the candidate (yes, he really is running for president) thinks he knows why the massacre happens. "You look at all these violent videos that are out there."
Yes, maggot, we did. On the evening news, all week, and their message is crystal clear: Death, as a political force, to the NRA!
