Back in the day we used to have these indoor dart-gun fights. A company called Placo made spring-loaded guns that shot rubber-tipped darts. The rule was, if you got hit by a dart, you were out of the game until the next round. If the guns were new and their springs weren’t worn out, one of those darts could leave a quarter-sized welt on bare skin. Good […]
They’ll be back
The gang in Oregon really wanted a martyr and they finally got one. Now, of course, they’re variously claiming that LaVoy Finicum was ambushed and shot in the back and lying on the ground and also somehow had his hands up. Next tweet you see, they’ll say he was singing “Amazing Grace” and passing out treats to needy children. I’m sure he was a nice enough guy. […]
Ain’t a thing we can do
He looks like they all do: geeky and vacant and profoundly weird. After all these mass shootings, you look at the pictures of the suspect and think, “how in the hell did that asshole get a gun?” But then this is America and acquiring a semiautomatic weapon is the least of a young psycho’s problems. In this case, apparently, it was a birthday gift from his father, […]
Coulda been worse
Here’s one thing I learned this week: If you’re going to encounter a homicidal lunatic, it’s really a lot better if he has a kitchen knife instead of an assault rifle. I know: the NRA will certainly cast the Pennsylvania stabbing incident as another case where an intrepid teacher could have blown away the miscreant if only the teacher had been allowed — or better yet, required […]
Murder at the matinee
A dispute over texting quickly escalates to murder. It figures that this would happen in Florida, where personal restraint has never been considered a virtue. And it figures that the immediate result would be a virulent internet flame war about guns and cell phones. Two sacred objects. Both seem to bring out the worst in people, don’t they? My judgment is as knee-jerk as anyone else’s: Querulous […]
People kill people. With guns.
I suppose it’s true what the gun nuts say: banning semiautomatic weapons with high-capacity magazines would not have prevented this latest gun massacre. It would only have infringed on the survivalist fantasies of law-abiding citizens. That’s just another thing to mourn about this: We can’t stop it. We can’t even slow it down. Not now, anyway. In a country where there are as many guns as people, […]
What sort of guns should lunatics own?
Another young lunatic grabs up some semiautomatic weapons and starts killing people at random. Once again, the discussion afterward is not about what can be done, but what can’t be done. Specifically, we can’t do anything to keep young lunatics from acquiring as many military-grade firearms as they want. The New York Times just updates its ongoing list of Worst Mass Shootings, and the Washington Post runs […]