You Might Be a Gun Nut If.....

The first group of gun nuts lack the cajones to say what they really think...that the second amendment is a historical artifact no longer relevant in today's world. They choose to pussy-foot around this by constantly trying to chip away at it, neutering the protection a little at a time.

The other gun nuts prefer to live with their collective head in the sand...or tucked somewhere else.

"The NRA promotes gun safety programs" and "I need my guns to prevent government tyranny" are two statements that, while not demonstrably false, accomplish practically nothing in the real world.

• If you believe that more laws, holding all else constant, would have prevented this massacre, you might be a gun nut.
  
• If you think that a Saturday morning NRA-sponsored gun safety event would have prevented this individual from shooting his targets as intended, you might be a gun nut.
• If you think that packing a pistol is the way you're going to avoid government tyranny in the 21st century, then you really are a gun nut.

Societies, just like people, don't make big changes until they feel enough pain from their current ways.

We can talk all we want about band-aid solutions that sound good to the idiots who eat this kind of crap out of CNN's hands, but small laws, safety classes and acting as if we still live out on the frontier don't solve a goddamned thing. They demean both the speaker and the listener.

Both sides need to finally get honest and talk about the modern meaning of the second amendment and not hide behind things that simply act to rile people up without illuminating anything.

Or, those who like to lead the nation in talking about guns constantly, can continue to flap their gums with all their high-minded talk and act as if these things are an aberration or someone else's fault.

If you want to know my opinion, I think we'd better buckle up our government-mandated seatbelts, kids. We still have some rough road to cover before we get to the point where people want to be honest about all of this.

Shame on the News Media

I know that I don't have a Drudge-like following here ;-) so am fully-cognizant that any editorial decisions I make on which pictures I post have no measurable effect on how the world operates. But that said...

Shame on the media outlets who insist on showing picture after picture of the VA Tech killer and his video. While one of them might be sufficient, the excessive use of them adds no new information to the reader/viewer.

Furthermore, CNN was running one of the more disturbing ones (assuming that these horrific images can be rank ordered) as their main picture, but right next to it was an item about Sanjaya being voted off of AI last night.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer's print edition this morning was just pathetic.

Here's a cool resource of what daily print editions look like.

Is That a Peackock in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to Get the Cho Seung-Hui Tape?

MSNBC's self-congratulatory coverage of itself last night was really pretty lame.   Keith Olbermann had News Div President Steve Capus on who was, near as I could tell, taking part in some kind of recreational activity on a Craftmatic Bed.

It's not polite to talk with your mouth full, Steven.  Didn't your mommy teach you that?

"What were they celebrating," you ask?

After getting a package from the person responsible for the worst shooting on American soil in our history, this Paragon of Virtue, decided to share this information with the police and in doing so, held off on reporting it for a few hours.

Better buy your ticket to Stockholm, boys!  Desmond Tutu better get his ass out of the way!  The Do-Gooders are coming!

It's been a busy April for Capus, though.  Just last week, he was on with Keith and other NBC hosts throwing his shoulder out, patting himself on the back for making the tough call that it was time to get rid of Imus just after all the major advertisers pulled out.

If this is the beginning of a trend, a sort of Real World view of the newsroom and the decisions they make, I'm mildly interested, but not if it turns into the informational equivalent of wartime propaganda.  

They are up to something over there at the Peacock, though.  There are times when I work at home and have seen their "behind the scenes" shots when a producer with headphones on whispers to the 
host what is coming up.  When I first saw this, it struck me as ripping off SNL more than MTV, though.  I was wating for Contessa Brewer to walk into the back room and break into song with someone!

"Obama sounded like he was doin' the junk nod."

The Politico is running an item on the Junior Illinois Senator's speech in Milwaukee the other day in which he spoke of the VA Tech killings and L'Affaire de Imus in the same breath.

They're both representative of our culture of violence, you see.

While I applaud his moving to bigger themes and not using a tragedy as a license to jump back into the hackneyed Brady Bill debate again, this might be a bit of a stretch and a stump speech might not be the place to make such a point.

But who am I? Listen for yourself.

The subject line of this post came from a poster on Politico and it just made me giggle.

What Would Jesus Do?

The photo above, by Rodolfo Gonzalez, is a memorial near the shooting in Columbine.

Interesting item over at The Corner about whether the gunman should be included in any sort of symbol of all those who died yesterday in Virginia.

When you decide to use a Christian symbol to memorialize the dead, you really have to examine the depth and dimensionality of your Christian faith when it comes to deciding on putting up a cross for the gunman.

On this question, I am agnostic.

Increasingly familiar territory for me lately....

Statement from the NRA on Today's Events

Surely the regular actors are taking their places behind the curtain, waiting to enter, from stage left and right, to exploit today's tragedy to meet their respective agenda (or agendas depending on how old school you are.)

Here's the NRA's statement.

And the Brady Bill folks.