Sadly for many in the white-wing of American politics the right to life ends with birth. They hate abortion but then the right to own any gun any time with unlimited ammo dominates. Forget that silly old “right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.”
Hell, without our precious Second Amendment and millions of AR15s we would be just like those famous hell-holes that regulate guns: Canada, Australia, Denmark, Switzerland…
My friend, Ed Casaccia had this to say on his facebook page: “I would like to politely suggest that the Republican party and the National Rifle Association take their “thoughts and prayers” for the families of those who were mowed down by gunfire in Florida today and stuff them up their collective asses.
“You are evil.
“You have obstructed every attempt to do something about the plague of gun violence in this country for DECADES.
“You have told brazen lies about more guns causing more safety. This has been demonstrated to be an untruth by looking at localities that require gun ownership and doing a body count. Math doesn’t lie, even if you never made it through the multiplication table.
“Each and every one of you who practices and defends what is disgustingly referred to as “gun culture” have more blood on your hands tonight. If you are “pro gun” you share in the responsibility for what happened today because you have been voting to prevent a solution for DECADES.
“Rick Scott, for the useless gesture of flying flags at half staff, there is a spot reserved for you in Malebolge, Dante’s eighth circle of Hell, and the destination of you and all other hypocrites.
“For each of the kids who will never see graduation, perhaps never know love, for each family that will have an empty chair every Thanksgiving and Christmas, for every teacher who died while working for subsistence wages because you vote against raising the money to pay them properly, you have a date in Judecca, the innermost section of Dante’s ninth circle, at the bottom of the abyss.
“You have earned it.”
====================
Then I posted my response on Ed’s facebook page:
THE NEW CIVIL WAR
We in the U.S. are suffering through a simmering, sporadic civil war. It is the angry isolated male versus civil society. It is the angry, bitter, self-righteous avenger, nearly always a man, killing our fellow Americans with military caliber weapons. These attacks are domestic terror. You have only to see and hear the high students from Parkland to know how terrorized they and their families and their teachers and their extended community is. You have only to listen to Gabby Giffords or the survivors from Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook or Columbine or San Bernadino or Las Vegas or Fort Hood…or any of the nearly endless list of modern-day mass killings to know what domestic terror is.
The catalog of social and business and political fallacies these continued mass killings uncover is also lengthy. First and foremost we allow almost any man 18 or older to buy almost any weapon and any amount of magazines and man-killing ammo he wants. Very few nations in the world allow that. None of the nations you or I would ever move to would allow that. The US could track multiple gun buys or massing of ammo, but we don’t. We could monitor social media for anybody proclaiming the intention to be a school shooter. We can’t even do that. Is gun ownership even part of the questioning when there is a mental health intervention? In the US the federal government cannot even research how to stop gun violence. It is as if tobacco managed to stop research on lung cancer or Detroit got research into seat belts banned. Absurd.
Next, there is in this nation now a toxic stew of First and Second Amendment interpretations that are perilous to the health and future of this nation. The NRA has bullied white-wing politicians into accepting their interpretation that the right to bear arms means any gun, anywhere at anytime with as much ammo as you want. Thomas Jefferson would be puking at the high schoolers’ funerals if he came back to see what we’ve done with the Bill of Rights. First Amendment? We basically allow almost any lie, canard, phoney video, slander or conspiracy madness to have worldwide circulation through the Internet that I and other naive fools once imagined could be used for the betterment of civilization. I think the current state of the world, with phoney youtube and twitter and facebook content, proves that nothing is so well designed that it cannot be turned to evil and terrorism. We can’t even find a way to keep Isis from recruiting via the Internet. As a journalist I spent my life working under the protection of the First Amendment. Does that give me or anybody the right to use that freedom to incite violence, hatred, bigotry and racism?
Gun makers are now suffering an economic crisis because pro-gun Trump makes their gun seizure paranoia campaign less believable so their sales are falling. The industry should be nationalized and rationalized. Why should anybody make a profit from making deadly products and then marketing them with lies? I know we allow the opioid makers to laugh all the way to Bermuda with their deadly profits. It ain’t just here in ‘Merica…VW sold polluting cars as clean, banks all over the world have been too happy to help Russian mafia launder money, Chinese firms put all kinds of toxic crap into the products they sell because the “market demands it”…fossil fuel companies are rushing the earth into an extinction crisis. Get the money now, before everybody dies. Even if we solve the American gun madness over time, the planet itself is in danger of continued mass dying. And mega-corps keep raking in the dough by selling products that make it worse from coal to plastic to paint remover.
I hope the Florida kids and their age cohort have the stamina and anger for this fight. I was a draft dodger in 1968 because I knew the Vietnam War was immoral, stupid and destructive. Yet all the protests and refusals didn’t stop it for another six years! Good luck kids, you are up against racism, wealth and entrenched male violence.
I am not the only person who thinks these shootings are terrorism. Gov. Hickenlooper of Colorado, click here. They don’t get labelled as such when the gunman is a white male.
Tags: AR15, assault weapons, Canada, Danta, gun control, guns, Parkland, school shootings, Thomas Jefferson, violence
Veblen21 
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