Day After: Sorrowful and Mad as fuckin’ shit

December 15, 2012

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(Illustration above found via BagNewsNotes. Artwork out front found here).

Up this morning in a sad, but way-pissed mood.
And like Jon Stewart’s faux news, reality and truth is way-better explained nowadays from such locations than anywhere else — a mournful, indignant situation:

Americans reported feelings of overwhelming disgust with whatever abhorrent bastard did this and with the world at large for ever allowing it to happen, as well as with politicians, with the NRA, and above all with their own pathetic goddamn selves, sitting in front of a fucking computer instead of doing fucking anything to help anyone—Christ, as if that were even fucking possible, as if anyone could change what happened, as if the same fucking bullshit isn’t going to keep happening again and again and fucking again before people finally decide it’s time to change the way we live, so what’s the point?
What the hell is the goddamned point?
The Onion, ‘Fuck Everything, Nation Reports

Yesterday, I didn’t hear anything about the horror at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., until almost mid-day when the afternoon clerk at the liquor store I manage came on duty — despite my surfing all the InterWebs earlier, the incident occurred after I left for work.
The clerk looked a little anxious when he said, “This won’t make your day,” and then proceeded to tell me about 25 people being shot to death at an elementary school, one shooter dead and police with a manhunt underway for a second gunman.
The stuff on the second guy was apparently the early mistake with the shooter’s brother.
And with all the techno-bullshit, errors happen way-too-fast:

Adding to the confusion, Gawker reports, was a Twitter account from another Ryan Lanza, who has no relationship to the other Lanzas, except to the share their last name.
His appeal: “so aperently (sic) im getting spammed bc someone with the same name as me killed some ppl… wtf?”

Numb was the feeling the rest of the shift yesterday — and even hoping my clerk-messenger was wrong, but later after consulting my laptop, fuck-it! He wasn’t.

Guns are a most-instrumental artifact of US history — we’ve used them to kill everything locally that stood in our conquering march across North America the last 200 years, and a gun-nut does not understand the difference between guns and killing.
Just yesterday, this asshole in Florida was indicted for first-degreee murder in the shooting death of a black 17-year-old over loud, contemporary-pop music (depending on the tastes of the listener, and in this case, rap), and his defense was that state’s asshole-law of ‘stand your ground,’ which means one can go back and get a gun, return to the action, and fire away.
Then just happily drive away.
Meanwhile, a guy in Jacksonville successfully used the ‘stand your ground’ defense to evade a murder charge, and although the whole case involves several parts and a couple of different narratives, police reports indicate the following: They said an argument followed and Williams went and got a rifle.
He returned to the scene, killed this one guy with a couple of shots and wounded a 14-year-old girl in the leg.
The dead guy’s daughter was also there, her friend the wounded kid.
Bad shit all around.

Of course, the real assholes in this whole crap shoot is the National Rifle Association, the big-lipped, gun-crazed NRA, an organization so in-tuned to making-up shit, it has become nearly-synonymous with the GOP,  and the truly-bat-shit-crazy Tea Party.
Newsday this morning: The NRA on Friday declined to comment “until the facts are thoroughly known,” according to an statement released by its communications office. Phone calls to Andrew Arulanandam, an NRA spokesman, weren’t returned.
The assholes most-likely right now are scurrying around, hard-nosed-pressed to piece together some kind of wicked shit to handle the clamoring fallout.

Disturbance comes the armament — from CBS this afternoon:

A law enforcement source told CBS News that Adam Lanza had three weapons with him during the attack: Two handguns (a Sig Sauer and a Glock), and a Bushmaster .223 assault rifle; spent shells were found in the school.
Those three weapons were registered to his mother.
There was also a fourth weapon (a long gun) found in the car he drove to the school.

The big problem here is gun-nut assholes.
This particular Fox News bit of unnerving, highly-contradictory, way-ironic bullshit — all just in the lede.
Written by some nit-twit named Mercedes Colwin, who starts off with a normal reaction when hearing of the school shooting, then way quickly curves off into horror-talk:

I had just finished a meeting with a client when I heard about the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
As a parent of two, my first thought was how I couldn’t wait to hug my children.
My next thought turned to the victims and the parents who, due to the unfathomable actions of a monster, will not be able to do the same tonight.
All I can think about are these children, their lost dreams and wasted futures.
However, to my dismay this unspeakable tragedy has immediately become a springboard for gun-control advocates to lambast our gun laws.
It disturbs me greatly that literally hours after one of the worst events in modern American history, media pundits and publications like, The New Yorker are politicizing the murder of kindergarten students to further their gun control agenda.

What had riled her trigger finger was Alex Koppelman’s most-excellent rant in yesterday’s New Yorker on White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s soft-pedal waffle in the wake of the shootings, “I don’t think today is that day,” to discuss gun violence:

Carney’s response was a predictable one.
This is the way that we deal with such incidents in the U.S.—we acknowledge them; we are briefly shocked by them; then we term it impolite to discuss their implications, and to argue about them.
At some point, we will have to stop putting it off, stop pretending that doing so is the proper, respectful thing.
It’s not either.
It’s cowardice.

Colwin’s response: What Koppelman fails to appreciate is that every school that faces such a tragedy is an individual isolated event that demands our respect and does not deserve to be desensitized into a political debate.
Interesting those key words: ‘an individual isolated event.’
None of these ‘events‘ are solitary beyond themselves — the Portland, Ore., mall gunman, proclaiming himself, “I am the shooter,” from just last Tuesday, is linked hard-fast together with the crazed ‘shooter‘ at Happy Hook Elementary by the kind of easy violence guns, and only guns, can quickly provoke amongst a crowd of people.
Any of those terrifying weapons Adam Lanza was carrying yesterday could have done massive damage — it’s not just the fuckin’ assault rifles, but the whole, entire gun bullshit.

And back to the fuckin’ NRA.
This last June from a PolitiFact post tearing apart the NRA’s claim President Obama is going to take away everybody’s guns: Nearly one in two Americans now have a gun in their home and just 26 percent favor an all-out ban on handguns, down from 60 percent in 1959, according to a recent Gallup survey. The number of Americans who support tighter gun laws is at an all-time low.
From a Washington Post blog this afternoon on US gun ownership:

Americans don’t just have more guns that anyone else — 270 million privately held firearms.
They also have the highest gun ownership per capita rate in the world, with an average of about nine guns for every 10 Americans.
The second highest gun ownership rate in the world is Yemen; yes, Americans have nearly twice as many guns per person as do Yemenis, who live in a conflict-torn Arab nation still dealing with poverty, political unrest, a separatist Shia insurgency, an al-Qaeda branch, and the aftereffects of a 1994 civil war.

WTF!

Maybe, just maybe all that was before yesterday.
Even Obama teared up during a presser on the shootings: “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”
We’ll hold you to that ‘regardless of the politics‘ bullshit, Mr. President.

Just getting too tired of getting pissed off at being sorrowful.

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