America Must Come Together, Law-Abiding Citizens, and Other American Bullshit

No disrespect America, but a little tough love is in order: I am tired of your bullshit.

In the wake of just the latest, not the last, shooting spree against a bunch of innocent people, America's reaction has been predictable: "The people of Aurora are in our thoughts and prayers", "We need to come together as a nation and abandon our divisions", and the quite irritating "There is nothing we can do to stop these things from happening (so let's do nothing about it)."

It's true that we cannot do anything to prevent crazy people from doing crazy things, I wrote it myself yesterday on this blog. But, if memory does not fail me, after Oklahoma City we have made it harder for farmers to get fertilizers; and in the wake of 9/11 and then the failed shoe-bomber guy we have made it impossible for 90 year-old ladies to walk through security with their shoes on. So I refuse to accept the common bullshit (let's not call it wisdom, at least) that we cannot do anything to prevent senseless mass murders from happening. Sure, we cannot prevent all of them, so how about we just make it harder?

Someone needs to explain to me how the Second Amendment grants common citizens, and not members of an army, the right to buy and carry AR-15s, AK47s, and other weapons normally reserved for war, not for hunting deer or buffalo. For god's sake: the natives used to kill buffalo with arrows, can't we just shoot deer with a bolt-action rifle?

And someone also needs to explain to me why, in order to defend our family from assault by criminals, we need large-capacity magazines, capable of holding 33 rounds? (And by the way: in 19 years in America I have not encountered one person who was a victim of a home invasion.) These are a couple of the things we can start banning if we want to start making a difference

It is true that we cannot possibly stop a determined killer intent on killing, but why should we make it easy for him to kill as many innocents as possible? Why is it okay for anyone but law enforcement and the military to order 6,000 rounds of ammunition without someone knocking on his door and checking up on him? Because of the Second Amendment? So let's gut the sucker. Since when was the Second Amendment the unchangeable word of God?

And, truly, the Second Amendment and the well-regulated militias thing... Rachel Maddow had a spot-on take down of that logic a few months ago, which I wrote a post about, which you can find here.

If the President, Congress, the two shitty parties we have, and the people of America in general truly want to honor the thousands of people who die from gun violence every year in this nation, not just the Aurora victims, let us all have an honest discussion about how to change the law, and the constitution, to make life harder for criminals and a bit better for so-called "law-abiding" citizens.

And by the way, seems to me James Holmes was a pretty law-abiding citizen to all effects and purposes. Until Friday morning, that is.