Tag Archives: newtown

Another factor at work in Newtown: unbridled selfishness

I think this is the scariest and most infuriating article I’ve read so far:  In Town at Ease With Its Firearms, Tightening Gun Rules Was Resisted.  It tells of the evolution of Newtown from a partially rural area in which some folks enjoyed owning and using guns for hunting or sport, to a place where a folks with assault weapons were are waking, disturbing, and terrifying their own neighbors with semiautomatic gunfire and exploding targets.  That’s right – exploding targets.

Gun enthusiasts here, as elsewhere in the country, have taken to loading their targets with an explosive called Tannerite, which detonates when bullets strike it, sending shock waves afield.

Doesn’t improve your aim or better prepare you for the zombie apocalypse.  It’s just fuckin cool.

[A] police commission member, who is a lawyer, said he wrote [a] new ordinance, which would have imposed additional constraints on shooting, including limited hours, and a requirement that any target shooting range, and the firearms that would be used there, be approved by the chief of police to make sure they were safe. This was no liberal putsch, [he] said; three of the five commission members are Republicans, and two members are police officers.

Of course, the new ordinance was voted down.  This isn’t Second Amendment Rights vs. Creeping Socialism; it’s peace and quiet and neighborly consideration vs. unbridled selfishness.   One shooting range owner explained,

The explosions [the] neighbors hear are targets that are legally available at hunting outlets. “If you’re good old boys like we are, they are exciting,” he said.

I’m guessing loud music and barking dogs are more closely regulated than exploding targets.  Selfish, selfish bastards.

 

 

This is no time to politicize? This is a perfect time to politicize!

Buzz: Sheriff, this is no time to panic! Woody: This is the perfect time to panic!

 

Every time another gun massacre happens, the commissars of weapon-correctness announce that we should not politicize the tragedy.  They say this loud enough and often enough to shout us past the tragedy and into the next campaign where “taking away gun rights” equates to socialism, communism, and the coming of a one-world government that will force you to teach your disabled kids science,* and every politician of every party runs fast in the opposite direction.

Fuck that.

We need to politicize this most recent gun massacre because, in this country, “politicize” means “figure out wtf to do about.”  The opposite of “politicize” is not “debate respectfully” or “decide unanimously.”  It’s “sit around with our collective thumbs in our collective asses** and do nothing.”  So let’s politicize.  Let’s talk.  Argue even – it’s how things get decided in a democracy.

And when we talk, let’s talk about the fact that – as a friend pointed out on Facebook – you have to provide more information to buy Sudafed than to buy a gun.

 

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* Or something like that.  I get my right wing conspiracies confused sometimes.  For example, do the same paranoid wingers who defeated the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on the grounds that the one-world government would force them to kill their disabled kids oppose gun control on the theory that the future one-world government might prevent someone from killing their disabled kids?  It’s so confusing!

** Not sure how this works in practice.