The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Naw, guns don’t kill people, insanity and hatred kills people. Or in the words of one Ohio state representative, trans and gays were the real culprits in this weekend’s mayhem and mass murder. One Congressman claimed it was video games. Another pointed the finger at drag queens and marijuana. Former Arkansas Governor and Fox Gadfly Mike Huckabee says it’s a lack of thoughts and prayers. Me, I’m gonna go out on a long limb here, call me crazy, call me gay, call me an atheist, dress me in women’s clothes, and say it was guns. Yup, I think it was guns.

I grew up with Roy Rogers, cowboys and Indians, shoot-em-ups, all those wild west westerns where a 6 shooter kept the crooks from taking over everything but Boot Hill. I’ve owned guns, still do. I’ve hunted squirrels and rabbits and deer until I got in touch with my touchy-feely side and couldn’t do it anymore. I still kill crab but I don’t need a gun to do it. Touchy-feeliness only goes so far and I draw the line on Dungeness.

And trust me, I don’t have the solution to gun violence in America. There are more guns than people and there are people who like their guns better than they like other people. I just don’t think they ought to use their guns on the folks they don’t like. But now we got assault rifles, military weapons, more firepower than the police. We got folks like my bipolar buddy, Fast Freddy, who flew back to his home state on his last visit to buy a titanium .44 pistol and an AR-15 assault rifle. He was more manic than an amphetamine monkey but the gun shop sold him both. Something wrong with that picture if you’d seen Freddy at the height of his departure from lithium. Only picked up 32 times by the local police on his long trek out to our place. They knew he was off his rocker, I bet the gun store clerk did too.

Happiness may be a warm gun to some, but there are plenty of families who would beg to differ. Suicides, spousal killings, mass murders, accidental shootings. Gee, you think we should do something about this?

Let me assume for a South End minute that we actually do have the right to bear arms. I can’t keep a rocket launcher. I’m not supposed to have an automatic weapon. So is it such a far reach that we could outlaw — I know, I know, only the outlaws — assault rifles and military weapons? Maybe put some restrictions on dum-dum and armor-piercing ammo? The answer, if you’re not an NRA true believer, is fundamentally yes. Nobody’s taking ALL your damn guns, Bubba. Keep more than one by all means.

But sometime, somewhere in this fairy land we call America, we have to face the fact that blood is in the streets, in a community near yours, and people are dying, families are devastated, the carnage is real. And here’s some news for my Republican apologists. It ain’t the trans, it isn’t the gays, it isn’t violent video games, it isn’t insanity and hatred pulling that trigger. And no, Mike, it’s not a paucity of prayers. It’s guns. Wake up and smell the cordite.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 7th, 2019 at 3:24 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.