“This isn’t a gun problem — this is a mental problem,” thus spake "The Donald" (as one of his flashier wives, Ivana, used to call him lovingly) - regarding the latest gun violence case of the WDBJ-TV reporters shooting. We have to listen to him, a because he is a multi-billionaire given to loud talk and b because he is the only voice coming out of the oratorically challenged overcrowded Republican field of presidential hopefuls. He being a billionaire, poor me would have expected him to stand up to the mega-moneybags NRA lobby, similar to that other famous billionaire from New York - the ex-mayor. But, of course, the coiffed one is no liberal pinko like the ex-mayor! No sir, he is all red-meat true-blue Republican, eager to feed the middle-America exactly what it (he thinks) wants to hear. Hey, I am just grateful he managed to avoid insulting the victims in some manner. In all fairness though, he is just one more of the tongue-tied politicians too scared to deal with the gun lobby.
Surely, we have heard and will hear more sickening platitudes like "Guns don't kill, people do" and the hand-wringing adjectives like the curse or the blight or the scourge - of violence! Adjectives that subtly suggest these are god-given calamities that we mortals can't fight. We will hear about the mental sickness, about the blot on the civilized society and on and on.
Words - cheap, empty and aplenty words! Action - why should we expect any action now? We didn't see any action when the presidents were fired upon, when a Congresswoman was shot at, when scores of people were gunned down in a movie theater, in a high-school, in an elementary school, in a church for heaven's sake! What makes us think two TV news reporters are going to be any more precious than all of the above?
The insane obsession with the second amendment - drafted in 1791, in the infant days of a budding democracy, which had just overthrown an oppressive foreign regime - is often touted as the fig-leaf defense of the "right to bear arms". This is rich, when we reserve the right to - Rightly so! - mock other societies for their archaic and anachronistic belief systems completely out of touch with the modern reality.
The childish defense of "Guns are the symbol of the outdoorsmen, the hunters, the conqueror of wilderness" is beyond laughable. No rabbits, no Bambi, no bears and no moose are so fierce that they need multiple magazine, semi-automatic, assault rifles to shoot them down.
The hand-wringing response of "we can't really enforce even the common-sense gun restrictions, because only the good guys obey the law and the bad guys will keep their guns" is just despicably pathetic - from the same ilk who are always asserting "America's special place" and the "Can do" attitude. This is the same bunch that often touts - Rightly so! - "A country that can send a man to the moon, can accomplish anything." Of course it can! If there is a will to do it. Just look at how dramatically cigarette smoking - so hot in the last century has been all but reduced to the ashes. Smoking was far more prevalent and actually an addiction. The point is attitudes can change.
I can't help but be cynical, that if the gunman did not make a video of the shooting, and if the victims were not news people, this may not even have gotten the 15 minutes that it did. And Trump, among others, has the gall to say it may have helped if the victims had the guns too.
We can only hope the epitaph for this once-great nation doesn't read a few hundred years from now - "Very imaginative, very industrious, very wealthy nation. Too bad this otherwise self-correcting civilization just mysteriously preoccupied itself with playing real-life shootouts, while the rest of the world was on the cusp of the next fantastic technological revolution."
Moving on to the other stories of the day, all three major market indexes ...
Surely, we have heard and will hear more sickening platitudes like "Guns don't kill, people do" and the hand-wringing adjectives like the curse or the blight or the scourge - of violence! Adjectives that subtly suggest these are god-given calamities that we mortals can't fight. We will hear about the mental sickness, about the blot on the civilized society and on and on.
Words - cheap, empty and aplenty words! Action - why should we expect any action now? We didn't see any action when the presidents were fired upon, when a Congresswoman was shot at, when scores of people were gunned down in a movie theater, in a high-school, in an elementary school, in a church for heaven's sake! What makes us think two TV news reporters are going to be any more precious than all of the above?
The insane obsession with the second amendment - drafted in 1791, in the infant days of a budding democracy, which had just overthrown an oppressive foreign regime - is often touted as the fig-leaf defense of the "right to bear arms". This is rich, when we reserve the right to - Rightly so! - mock other societies for their archaic and anachronistic belief systems completely out of touch with the modern reality.
The childish defense of "Guns are the symbol of the outdoorsmen, the hunters, the conqueror of wilderness" is beyond laughable. No rabbits, no Bambi, no bears and no moose are so fierce that they need multiple magazine, semi-automatic, assault rifles to shoot them down.
The hand-wringing response of "we can't really enforce even the common-sense gun restrictions, because only the good guys obey the law and the bad guys will keep their guns" is just despicably pathetic - from the same ilk who are always asserting "America's special place" and the "Can do" attitude. This is the same bunch that often touts - Rightly so! - "A country that can send a man to the moon, can accomplish anything." Of course it can! If there is a will to do it. Just look at how dramatically cigarette smoking - so hot in the last century has been all but reduced to the ashes. Smoking was far more prevalent and actually an addiction. The point is attitudes can change.
I can't help but be cynical, that if the gunman did not make a video of the shooting, and if the victims were not news people, this may not even have gotten the 15 minutes that it did. And Trump, among others, has the gall to say it may have helped if the victims had the guns too.
We can only hope the epitaph for this once-great nation doesn't read a few hundred years from now - "Very imaginative, very industrious, very wealthy nation. Too bad this otherwise self-correcting civilization just mysteriously preoccupied itself with playing real-life shootouts, while the rest of the world was on the cusp of the next fantastic technological revolution."
Moving on to the other stories of the day, all three major market indexes ...
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