Fill in the Blanks

A lone gunman armed with _____ shot and killed _____ in East Buttputt, Ohio, as horrified _____ ran shrieking from the scene. The gunman, identified as ______, a ___-year-old unemployed _____, attempted to escape in a _____ but was _______ by the police. Aside from the _______ killed,  _______ more victims were injured, three critically. The gunman had a total of ____ weapons with enough ammunition, according to police, to kill ______ people.

“It was horrible,” said __________, who witnessed the shooting. “He was yelling and screaming about organized _______  and _______. I hid under a ______ and prayed.”

According to neighbors, ________ was a troubled youth who had clashed several times with ______ and believed that _________ and that it was is duty to ______. The gunman’s parents, _____ and _____ refused to comment, but a _______ who knew the alleged shooter, said, “He was a strange little _______. He always liked playing with guns, and he seemed to have few ______.

The alleged shooter’s website showed him posing with an array of weapons, and a long message addressed to _______ criticized the _____, _____, and _____ policy of the United States.

According to records made available, _________ dropped out of ________ when he was ____ and worked several minimum wage jobs at ______, ______, and _______. Sources at _______, his last place of employment, say he was fired a month ago for_______ in the New England clam chowder, which is against ________ policy.

As families, friends and neighbors gathered to mourn at ________ with flowers, balloons and stuffed animals, ________ said of _________, one of the slain victims, that she was _______ a __________ who volunteered at the local _________ and sang with the ________ choir. “I don’t know what we’ll do without her,” said __________.

There have been 294 mass shootings in 274 days, according to _________.  Gunmen have invaded schools, movie theatres, restaurants, and malls, leaving trails of blood and  tragedy.

Reached at the National Rifle Association Headquarters in Virginia, NRA Spokesperson Wayne LaPierre re-iterated the organization’s belief that, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” He blamed legislators for their efforts to push through additional laws to regulate gun sales and ownership. “This is a violation of the Second Amendment that permits citizens to arms themselves against imminent threats, such as ISIS, the Pope, the Illuminati, poor people of all races, and anyone promoting gun control. It’s not the guns that need to be registered,” he told reporters, “it’s the crazy people.” LaPierre added that, “If we can register all the crazy people and know where they are at all times, there will be no more incidents such as the one that occurred at _______. “ Quoting Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush, LaPierre added, “But hey, stuff happens.”

In Washington, D.C., Representative ____________ (D, OH) said, “We have become a nation whose flag is always at half-mast.”

In other news, Kim Kardashian announced today that ________, but that she hopes to _______ by the weekend.

 

Gun, Again

And so it turns out the National Rifle Association was right—guns don’t kill people. It’s flags that kill people.

If a half-wit South Carolinian who under no circumstances should get near a firearm is able to purchase a gun because there’s a glitch in the control system; if said racist half-wit murders nine churchgoers; and if a Confederate flag is found on the half-wit’s web page, then let’s ban the flag!  Makes perfect sense.  

The “Guns don’t kill people” rationale used by the NRA was ridiculous from the start and that it endures and continues to be quoted proves a sad fact: That people will believe something—anything—if it is repeated over and over again. This is called advertising, and it is what persuades you to buy corn flakes rather than sugar pops. In the case of guns and the concomitant violence, this is also commonly referred to as the elephant in the room: An extremely large beast that takes up a lot of space, poops on the floor, bellows, trumpets, destroys the furniture and the home entertainment system but, we all like to pretend, doesn’t really exist.

Let’s belabor the obvious. In 2010, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and crime, 67 percent of all homicides in the U.S. were conducted using a firearm. According to the FBI, in 2012, there were 8,855 total firearm-related homicides in the US, with 6,371 of those attributed to handguns. The weapon used by Dylan Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, was a Glock 41 .45 caliber handgun that he purchased in spite of being convicted of a narcotic offense. The latter should have prevented him from buying anything more powerful than a Daisy air rifle. But there was an administrative error in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and so, to misquote Dalton Trumbo, Dylan got his gun.

The NRA, in one of those truly amazing turn-arounds, blamed the shooting on one of Roof’s victims. According to the International Business Times, Charles Cotton, an NRA board member, said that Clementa Pinckney, the pastor killed during the shooting, caused his own death because of his stance on state gun laws.  Pinckney was a state senator who pushed for tougher gun regulations in South Carolina.  

The outrage caused by the shooting led the usual great diversion. Much to the NRA’s relief the Confederate flag took a hit for the team. The gun lobby dodged a bullet—pardon the expression—as across the nation, the flag was lowered. I wonder though, with the flag gone, what will be blamed next?

Personally, I’m vastly relieved. Ridding ourselves of the Confederate flag is sure to solve the problems engendered by racism, white supremacy, gun violence, crazy people buying firearms, druggies buying firearms, drug dealers buying firearms, and avowed racists buying firearms.

 

Really, I feel so much better now!

 

 

Ten Questions for the NRA

Ever since the Newtown massacre, I’ve had disturbing image of Mr. Preston, my high school English teacher, toting a Glock. Mr. Preston was a spindly, tight-lipped man who once told me I was the best French student in his English class. His compliment launched my writing career, though it did not escape me that I was also the only French student in his class.  Mr. Preston was known to have bad reactions if his class was unruly. He would yell, harangue and occasionally throw blackboard erasers at his pupils. He once drew three large Xs with an indelible Magic Marker on the forehead of a particularly rambunctious teen.   

This has led me to wonder about the obscene proposal put forth by the National Rifle Association that teachers and principals should be armed while at work. I use the word obscene selectively. Until recently, I thought it connoted some sort of offensiveness, with sexual overtones. Now I see it as better defined by the Encarta Dictionary: disgusting and morally offensive, especially through an apparent total disregard for others' rights or natural justice.

Enough etymology, I have several questions for Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA.

1. Who decides which teachers/administrators will be selected? Will it be voluntary or mandatory? Will it be included in their résumés?
2. Who screens the teachers and roots out the pederasts, molesters and the potentially violent?
3. Who trains these newly armed persons; who pays them, buys guns for them. (Here, a suggestion: Let the NRA and the gun manufacturer pay for all of the above. Let them also be responsible for the inevitable lawsuits, hospitalizations, funeral costs, psychological treatment and any other negative outcome of putting so many more weapons in people’s hands.)
4. Where will the weapons be kept during the school day? Will there be a gun locker in every classroom or a sort of armory closet in the hallway? Or will the teachers keep them in their desk drawers next to the cheese and cracker treats and the breath mints? Might they simply wear the guns in holsters during classroom hours?
5. Do the teachers/administrators take the guns home at night? Will they be given gun safes for their homes?
6. Will every school have an armed guard during off-hours and vacation days to deter would be gun thieves?  Because make no mistake, there will be gun thieves.
7. And what kind of weapons are talking about anyway? Assault rifles, automatics, single shots or sawed-off shotguns?
8. What will be the protocol? Shoot first, ask questions later? Try to reason with the assailant as others draw a bead on him?
9. Will they be shooting to kill or merely to wound?
10. And of course, will the official shooter benefit from Good Samaritan laws? This is bound to be a hotly contested issue.

So those are the first 10 questions. There will be more.

And now for a request. Mr. LaPierre, on behalf of millions of French people, I respectfully request you change your name to something less Gallic sounding. You’re giving a bad name to a nation that long ago realized that guns do indeed kill people, and frankly, we want nothing to do with you.

 

Guns

Not too long ago, a man whose name I have deliberately forgotten wrote a book whose title I have also deliberately forgotten endorsing the concept that laws restricting gun sales and ownership actually promoted gun violence.  

This makes as much sense, of course, as suggesting one diet by having a fridge full of lemon meringue pies, or dealing with alcoholism by stacking cases of Jack Daniels in the drinker’s living room. It’s the kind of rationale the National Rifle Association as well as the powerful gun lobbies will happily espouse, and it is sheer crap.

Guns kill people. That’s what, for the most part, they’re designed to do. The idea is to send a fast-traveling projectile through someone else’s soft tissue with corresponding consequences. Yes, there are hunters, and yes, there are target shooters, and collectioners, and others who may have a legitimate reason to have guns, but they’re the minority. Unless we as a nation are at war at home and protecting ourselves from invading enemies, a lot more people are going to be injured by guns than will be protected by them.

It struck me during the latest outrage—yet another mass killing, this time mostly of children—that one of the appeals of firearms is that you don’t your hands dirty. They work from a distance. You will not be plastered by the victim’s blood and guts, and you can walk away with the crease in your jeans unsullied. That’s appealing, this idea of doing dirty work without getting soiled, and it goes a long way towards explaining why I have never seen a headline that read, Man Armed with Baseball Bat Kills 15 or Knife-wielding Youth Goes Berserk at Mall.

I don’t own a gun. If I did, it would be in a locked gun cabinet, and if my home were invaded, I would have to politely request that the offender allow me to put my pants on and get my guns from the locker, unfasten their trigger guards, and load them. Then we could get down to business. The point here is that gun safety is a handy oxymoron. If a weapon is to be used in an emergency, it has to be close at hand. If it is close at hand, it can be found and used by people whose mental capacities are doubtful at best—children, depressed teenagers, vengeful husbands.

Worldwide, seven out of the top 12 gun-related mass killings have occurred in the United States. Despite this, I fear that within days we will be back to business as usual. It’s merely mildly comforting to think that only a socially challenged miscreant would think of killing kindergarten children with a semi-automatic weapon, and, by definition, it is probably true.

The harsh reality is that our political system thankfully makes it impossible to chart the movement of would-be criminals, be they sane or not. But we can take away these people’s weapons, or render them unavailable. We can also enact legislation that makes any criminal activity involving repeating firearms worthy of a punishment so stringent that it will make anyone contemplating such a crime think twice. You want to knock over a 7/11 using your Glock? Think about spending the next 50 years in prison.

We can institute buybacks. We can insist that the same restrictions involving buying and driving an automobile apply to guns. If you want a weapon, learn how to safely own and operate it; be licensed; carry insurance so that if the weapon is stolen and used in a crime, some of the damages might be covered. Control the flow of ammunition, and make its purchasers identify themselves and sign a release guaranteeing that no crime will be committed with their purchase. If one is, punish the buyer who did not take the necessary steps to stop its theft or use.  Tax the hell out of firearms, and make sure the tax—like that on a car—is paid annually. Close gun shows where guns can be purchased with no other qualifications than cash on hand. Once a gun-related crime has been tried, destroy the weapons involved. Apply the three-strikes-you’re-out laws not to drug users but to gun wielders. Personally, if I have a choice between a pothead walking the streets or a guy with a gun, I’ll take the pothead any day.

Yesterday evening in his speech in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama called for ‘something to be done’ without specifying what that something may be. Let that something be gun control. As it stands, any measures taken will not see results for years to come. Let’s start now. It’s already almost too late,

 

 

  

Blinders, Part I

There were still horse-drawn carts when I grew up in Paris. The hooves made clopping sounds on the cobblestones, and the horses were not the sleek and shiny beasts of movies and race tracks. Instead, they were weary animals bedeviled by flies; they pulled loads of coal or cement or junk, and they wore blinders. I was told in school this was so they could only look straight ahead and not be overly concerned with what happened to their right or their left.

Recently, I’ve come to think the same thing is happening here to the leadership and population at large. We have blinders on; we do not want to be distracted from what lies directly before us, and because of this we’ve allowed a host of truly important issues to be merely discussed—endlessly—and not acted upon. 

Five overwhelming concerns leap to mind: gun control, infrastructure, the war on drugs, the financial rape of the average citizen, and the biggest bugaboo of them all, serious and effective political reform that would prod our openly somnolent public servants to action.

Gun control:  According to the Washington Post, mass murder by definition involves the killing of at least four victims in one incident. From 1976 to 2010, there were 645 mass murders—the overwhelming majority involving firearms—leaving behind the bodies of 2,949 men, women and children. 

That’s a lot of folks, folks. Our legislators have taken the easy way out, typified by a statement from Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana, who told the press, “You can’t stop crazy people from doing crazy stuff.”  It’s interesting how such a figurative shrug-off works. By blaming crazy people, we can absolve ourselves of any responsibility for follow-up action. I’m reminded that World War I was set off by the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. I suppose Tester would have called the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, just another gun-totting crazy guy over whom we were powerless.
Thirty-four years of mass murders, of course, are a drop in the bucket compared to the everyday mass-killing perpetrated by gun wielders. Eighty-four people are shot dead daily in this country. Think of that. Think of your children and family and friends and workmates all dying violently in one day… It amazes me that there are no permanent demonstrations against gun violence, and that we have accepted such damning statistics as a suitable cost of living in the USA.

Infrastructure: Over the coming decade, deteriorating infrastructure will pick $7000 from the pockets of each and every American household.  That, of course, is an abstract and symbolic number representing costs of lost wages because of time spent in congestion or in poor transit systems, and the wear-and-tear on cars by rough roads. In reality, this number from a recently released report by the American Society of Civil Engineers, attempts to illustrate a micro level. Thinking macro, we get 870,000 jobs or “a $3.1 trillion suppression of the GDP” before the decade is out.

A few simple examples:

• There are almost 600,000 bridges in the US. More than 150,000 of these are deficient. 
• We are spending $42 billion each year on highway maintenance.  We should be spending $146 to $310 billions annually over the next decade.
• Four-thousand-four-hundred of our 84,000 dams are deficient.
• Only 11 cities in the US have subway systems, some dating from the 1900s. All of them are in dire need of repairs.
• The 94,000 public schools in the country account for some $20 billion in annual spending. To work efficiently they need $254 billion.
• The 360 seaports in the US get $850 million annually but more than twice that is required for routine maintenance. 
• The pipes that deliver drinking water are mostly underground and falling apart. It will cost $335 billion to updates all the systems. Currently, less than a tenth of that sum is budgeted.
• A massive blackout could cripple the nation and its economy.  The country’s 157,000 miles of power line comprising the electrical grid need an infusion of $338 billion to pay for modernization and stave off almost certain failure.

More to come…