Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Baby, get your gun!
Toddler shooting tragedies could be prevented by arming 2 year-olds, insist NRA
http://newsthump.com/2014/12/31/toddler-shooting-tragedies-could-be-prevented-by-arming-2-year-olds-insist-nra-2/
After a two-year old tragically shot his mother using her legally concealed weapon, the NRA have insisted such tragedies could be prevented if all two-year olds were given their own guns.
The incident took place in Idaho in the US, where children are forced to wait until their 8th or 9th birthday before being given a gun of their own.
The NRA have been quick to offer a solution to such tragic incidents, insisting there is only one way to prevent them in future.
NRA spokesperson Wayne LaPierre explained, “It might have been an accident, but would this toddler have reached into his mother’s bag for a gun if he had already been holding his own gun? Almost certainly not.”
“If the toddler had pointed his own gun at his mother, she would still have had her own gun at hand and would have been able to defend herself, saving an American life right there.”
“Some in the liberal media would say targeting a small handgun called ‘My First handgun’ at children as young as two is dangerous, but I would say the only danger is not targeting them younger.”
“Once again a disarmed American is killed in an incident that could have been prevented had there been more guns available.”
NRA shooting solution
Idaho residents have called the dangerous lack of guns in their young child’s livesan ‘accident waiting to happen’, whilst gun manufacturers have announced a new toddler line being added to their range this summer.
Gun salesman Chuck Williams told us, “You know, ‘My First Handgun’ is great product for the first grader, but it’s too big and bulky for your average kindergarten attendee.”
“We’re working on a new design that comes in baby pink that fits nicely in the palm of your average baby.”
“You don’t even need to be able to walk in order to be able to use it.”
“God bless America!”
BLOGGER'S NOTE. This is yet another example of my stealing an article, but it's too important not to steal, satire or not. Hey, I'm a Canadian and have neither seen nor heard a gun in my entire life. The only person I have ever known who owned guns had an antique rifle collection, and he never fired them. Maybe the majority of Americans are the same. Aren't they? God, how I hope so.
I watched an old Dateline last night in which one man shot another in a Walgreen's parking lot, because he found out the guy was diddling his wife. When he explained the whole thing to police, he said something like, "No, I never meant to shoot anyone. I saw this guy coming for me so I pulled out my gun, and then he pulled out HIS gun. . . "
Like pulling out "my wallet", or "my keys". "My gun". "His gun." The thing I carry around with me all the time. . . for self-defense, of course.
Because this guy was carrying around His Gun as a regular accessory, he had a deadly weapon instantly at hand, so his rival lay dead a couple of seconds later. If neither of these guys had been armed - if they had been dumb old Canadians meeting in a Tim Hortons parking lot to have it out over a love triangle - this deadly incident would have amounted to a whole lot of sweater-pulling and missed head-punches, like in an NHL game where the blows don't connect because of the ice. (Come to that, there probably WOULD be ice.)
We're not "better", but this attitude of arming everyone to "stop gun violence" - I've never heard of it around here. Ever. We feel sadness about all this, along with a lot of distaste. And fear. We fear being swallowed up, as we always have.
Canadians are often denigrated and our nation labelled third-rate. But look at the dynamics here. Canada is almost 100 years younger than the United States. Where was the States in 1876? Not exactly where they are now, at least in cultural sophistication. Canada's population is roughly 1/10 of the States - you heard that right, it's 10%, spread over a much wider geographical area, with a limited number of concentrated areas of population. It's a different setup altogether. Our history is vastly different, and vastly boring, with virtually no bloodshed, at least not among civilians. One of our greatest writers, Robertson Davies, was famously quoted as saying, "Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejected the Revolution". Not wishing to fight, these Loyalists and crazy Quakerish types just pulled up stakes and left. Headed North, like a lot of people do.
Thus, celebrities are already planning their escape to Canada if Trump becomes President. It could happen. Escaped slaves from the American South found safe haven in Canada (though I never learned my own city was a hub of such sanctuary until years and years later: the school system seemed to think there was something shameful about it). And what about the draft dodgers? I know people who are still living here who escaped the draft in the 1960s. "Hey-hey-hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"
We're culturally different, and though (of course) there is violence, there are gangs (who get their hands on guns no matter what), murders, and so on, people are more apt to use clumsy methods like knives and clubs. Not exactly civilized, but a bullet is a bullet: when aimed just right, it is instantaneous death.
Don't arm the kids. Don't arm the men, or the women. Put down your weapons, beat your swords into ploughshares. Listen to us before it's too late. Dorky, powerless, boring old Canada, the nation without an ego, might just be on to something after all.
POST-BLOG REVELATIONS: Yes, there IS violence in Canada! But this is all I could find, one short article that was repeated over and over again. Somehow, "fighting for his life" had morphed into "serious but stable condition" by the end of the article. As far as I know, both men were OK, eh?, but boy were they pissed at each other until the cops got them to make up, and one guy bought the other guy a "donut" and a double-double.
POST-BLOG REVELATIONS: Yes, there IS violence in Canada! But this is all I could find, one short article that was repeated over and over again. Somehow, "fighting for his life" had morphed into "serious but stable condition" by the end of the article. As far as I know, both men were OK, eh?, but boy were they pissed at each other until the cops got them to make up, and one guy bought the other guy a "donut" and a double-double.
KINGSTON, Ont. — One man is charged with attempted murder and another is fighting for his life in hospital after an early morning knife fight at a Tim Hortons on Tuesday.
Police were called to the coffee shop just after 5 a.m.
They arrested a 30-year-man near the scene with a slew of charges, including attempted murder, weapons dangerous and two counts of breach of weapons prohibition order.
The 39-year-old man taken to hospital with stab wounds is in serious but stable condition, police said.
Police have not released names or what they thought was behind the early-morning coffee shop brawl.
BONUS STORY! No guns in this story at all! (Promise!)
JIM MOODIE, QMI AGENCY
May 22, 2014, Last Updated: 3:06 PM ET
It's the kind of story as Canadian as maple syrup - a northern Ontario man found a two-day-old baby moose on the side of the highway, picked it up and took it to Tim Hortons.
"She still had the umbilical cord and was still wet when I found her," Stephan Michel Desgroseillers of Copper Cliff, Ont., told Shirley Erkila, who posted a video of her petting the calf outside the coffee shop near Sudbury, Ont., on Monday.
"The wolves would have got to her," Desgroseillers said.
In a posting on the radio station Q92 Rocks Facebook page, Desgroseillers said he was the one who picked up the small calf and took it to the Wild at Heart Animal Shelter in Lively, Ont., but not before having to keep it for the night.
On his own Facebook page, he said the moose calf was "the sweetest thing ever except for the crying."
(I think I know how she feels.)
Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
Friday, December 11, 2015
The best thing I have ever seen about gun violence
Zonk Deck: Might have to change this meme, eh?
Like Reply 5 hours
Matt Bille: I agree with tighter nationwide regulations, but so many guns are in circulation that I don't know about the impact. I don't fear the guns so much as the people who use them.
Like Reply 5 hours
Dick Ostrander: Actually fear cars, cars killed more Americans than guns. Let's ban cars...
Like Reply - 1 4 hours
Dawn Kresan: Cars are needed, guns are not.
Like Reply 4 hours
Thomas Behnke: That's why you have to pass two tests to get a license to drive one, you have to register the vehicle, and have liability insurance, you can only drive a certain speed in certain places, and car manufacturers are REQUIRED to include features that are designed to ensure public safety, like seat belts, and mirrors, and there are certain features that are not legal on public roads, unlike guns that have none of these restrictions, even though a car is a tool whose primary purpose is to transport people and things faster and more efficiently than horses, where a gun is a tool whose primary purpose is to kill things faster and more efficiently than a cross bow. Because America and logic have never been the best of friends.
Blogger's Response. This, whether it's strictly allowed or not, is a transcript of a bit of dialogue on my Facebook page about gun violence. While I have a very hard time believing that Isis killed only four Americans in a year, and while I assume the rest of the statistics are pulled out of someone's ass for sake of a dramatic internet meme, it's nevertheless making a good point. But that last comment is something we need to think about. The flip remark "Actually fear cars, cars killed more Americans than guns. Let's ban cars. . . " is dismissive and even mocking, and either supports gun culture or is downright contemptuous of any attempt to condemn it. The next couple of comments put it all into perspective.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Dark night: thoughts on the Colorado massacre
Like a lot of people, I find I can't live - can't go about my day-to-day activities and try to enjoy life - if I'm paralyzed with grief, horror and fear. At the same time, how can I NOT feel this, and feel deeply for the survivors who are reeling with shock and disbelief?
It COULD happen to me, or to you. We don't have special protection, even if we believe in "God" or "the angels". It's NOT "a movie" or "part of the show". Those AREN'T "firecrackers", but gunshots! Gunshots that kill people.
Do you still think everything happens for a reason? Then tell me, explain to me: what was the reason for this?
I
get sad and melancholy and I don’t know how else to feel when the news is so
horrendous. In a sense, you have to just push it away. It’s not good mental
health to practice so much denial, and it’s not honest either, but what else can you do, not go out because
you’re afraid you’ll be gunned down? I don’t care about me, though I’d rather
be cleanly killed than be like Gabby Gifford who is now reduced to a
bewildered, childlike state.
It’s my loved ones I worry about. All the time,
really. I worry about apocalypse of some sort. The weather, world climate,
which is already deteriorating alarmingly, fire and flood, drought and snowstorm occurring where/when they shouldn't be, and I wonder what I am leaving for
my grandchildren and their children, if they even have a
chance to exist. And/or terrorism spreading like an evil ugly cancer, ultimate
weapons, what they used to call “germ warfare” that would knock out
so many people, there’d be no one left to try to cure it.
I know these are worst-case
scenarios and the stuff of science fiction and movies/books about the horror of dystopia, but
still, did anyone anticipate 9-11? I don’t see how anyone could have, and that's what alarms the shit out of me. It was just a
taste of what terrorists might do to us. If it happens again on a mass scale, of course it would be all-out nuclear
war and the end of everything.
We
can’t think about this, of course, but there is a cost to repressing it all the
time. If you talk about it and openly express fear about it, you’re seen as a
sort of party-pooper who doesn’t know how to have a good time (text-text-text,
tweet-tweet-tweet!). I asked Bill once, “what’s IN all these texts? What are people
texting about?” Bill said, “NOTHING.” And I think he’s right. They have no
content, so all they are is a sort of mutual narcissism and a smokescreen insulating people from their feelings.
Myself, I lasted about two seconds on Facebook because every time I tried to post anything serious, all I got was dead silence, or a nasty jibe meant to send up my comment or minimize it with a joke. I felt like I was eight years old and being ostracized on the playground once again.
With all this emphasis on "social networking", we're increasingly wearing masks and becoming anyone we want to be. It's fun for a while, then an awful barrenness steals in and begins to eat away at the core, the very foundation of your soul. And for the most part, you're not even consciously aware of it. Everyone's doing it, after all, so it must be OK.
Constant shallow tweeting, texting and phoning about nothing drowns out the drone of horror in the background, the sound of those awful air-raid sirens I used to hear as a kid (supposedly, just being tested out, but tested out far more often during the Cuban Missile Crisis and at other points when the nuclear clock stood at a few seconds to midnight).
I never used to hear about random shooters when I was younger: did you? Did you hear about events like this, or Columbine, or people just randomly opening fire in mall food fairs?
Why is this happening now, when it never used to happen before? Though there is a tremendous amount of denial about this subject, in many ways our world teeters on the brink. Brink of what? Climate meltdown, terrorism on a scale so massive it's beyond our capacity to grasp - and, the thing no one talks about any more, vast, even grotesque overpopulation.
Being crowded together far beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, a planet we have poisoned grievously and choked with vast islands of dead computers and other forms of plastic that will never degrade, has done something to us. It's cooking up a huge vat of collective stress, the kind of stress that can explode alarmingly in a susceptible person. I have a theory about why so many people are becoming grossly obese: it goes beyond the ubiquity of junk food in seemingly every store. Cramming a chocolate bar in your mouth helps you push down that low-grade vibration of anxiety about our survival as a species.
Try to project all the problems we have in the world to fifty years from now. I am afraid to. I just don't see how we will be able to stop the juggernaut, the relentless progression of a destruction we set in motion ourselves, mostly through thoughtlessness and greed.
We treat these horrendous fires and floods as if they came out of nowhere, but I see it as the planet hitting back, finally unable to stand any more abuse. We HAVE changed the world climate, folks - irrevocably, and not for the better. I am afraid that these feeble attempts to reduce our "carbon footprint" is too little, too late.
But we are awfully good at numbing ourselves to the truth, whether with drugs, food, or an obsession with technology you can hold in one hand like an ice cream cone.
If a lonely, isolated, socially-deprived person with a fascination with weaponry begins to entertain an idea - an awful idea - what will stop him? He won't talk to a friend about it because he doesn't have any friends. ("He kept mostly to himself" has become almost a cliche in these situations.) Friends aren't people any more - they're Facebook pages and "tweets". (And I think it's no accident that the inventor of this strange form of non-communication named it after the sound a silly, superficial, bird-brained creature.)
Every time something like this happens, authorities are quick to tell the public that it was an "isolated case", just one disturbed nut case whose mental illness had nothing to do with the rest of us or the alienated, anxiety-ridden, sick world we live in. That makes everyone feel better for a while. Doesn't it?
I don't know what to do about all this. It's as if I'm expected to care, but not care, or at least not care very much. I can't prevent another dark night, have no idea how to start. But the profound social isolation and alienation that gave rise to this horrific act affects all of us, without exception.
So we don't know how to feel. We don't know how to go on. "We thought it was part of the show," the survivors said.
And in an awful kind of way, maybe it was.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)