The War at Home

I don't have anything elegant or rage-filled-yet-effective to say about the horror in Newtown, Connecticut today. I just don't.

OK, this -- When I'm Queen of the Universe there's gonna be some BIG fat changes and, boyhowdy, there will be tremendously unhappy gun profiteers out there when I'm done.

mega sigh

 From ThinkProgress:

On Friday morning, 27 people were reportedly shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, CT. According to sources, 18 of these casualties were children. This is the second mass shooting in the US this week, after a gunman opened fire in an Oregon shopping mall on Tuesday, killing 2. ABC News reports that there have been 31 school shootings in the US since Columbine in 1999, when 13 people were killed.

The rate of people killed by guns in the US is 19.5 times higher than similar high-income countries in the world. In the last 30 years since 1982, America has mourned at least 61 mass murders. Below is a timeline of mass shootings in the US since the Columbine High massacre:
Timeline at the link.  

From Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog:

Guns are tools -- but much of the country doesn't see them that way. Much of the country sees a gun as both a religious object and a really awesome adult toy -- a combination Holy Grail and red Corvette. Read anything written by pro-gun types and you see this alternation between piety and toy-lust. To me, a gun is like a chainsaw or an acetylene torch. It's useful for certain things. It has a place in society if the owner handles it extremely carefully. Otherwise, it has the potential to be a menace to society.

I'm writing about the "respectable" gun culture, but there's also the badass (and badass-wannabe) gun culture. That consists of criminals and people who aren't criminals but romanticize violence and crime. But the "respectable" gun culture makes sure there's an overabundance of weaponry available to that culture.

And the "respectable" gun culture makes sure that plenty of weapons are available to anyone who's decided that his days of living a law-abiding life are coming to an end today, or tomorrow, or at some point in the near future. The mass shooters usually seem to fall into that category.

The entire column at the link. Go read -- it’s worth it.

From Charles Pierce’s post:

Resist, as strongly as you can, the people who seek to profit by isolating you in your homes, and in your anger, and in your wounded sense of aggrieved entitlement, and with all your guns.

We, The People. Those words are not an accident. They come before everything else in the document. Yes, even before the Second Amendment, they come, and there is a reason for that. When we commit ourselves to the American experiment — and our military does this formally, but we all do so when we accept the freedoms and benefits of that experiment — we commit ourselves first to We, The People, and the public institutions that are the manifestations of our political commonwealth in our daily lives.
Read the rest of it here.
And more here: Connecticut Shooting And We The People - The Horror Goes On - Esquire