My heart goes out to the families, especially the children, who were victims of the crazy person in Aurora, CO, last night at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. In case you have not heard the news, a gunman clad in black and wearing a gas mask attacked a midnight screening of the movie with smoke grenades, tear gas, and a shotgun, wounding over 30 people and outright killing 12.
Once again I am ashamed to live in a country which is so preoccupied with gun "rights" that we have allowed a tragedy of this magnitude to occur. I am ashamed to live in this country where we give so much press and negative energy to non-issues like abortion and gay marriage -- and yes, these are NON-ISSUES; if you don't like them, don't do them but damn it, keep your morality to yourself because it ISN'T MINE -- and yet refuse, year after year, to do anything about the proliferation of weapons. As blogger Barry Lyga said, more eloquently than I could have done, "anyone so brain-damaged as to walk into a movie theater with smoke grenades and a shotgun never should have been able to get his hands on smoke grenades and a shotgun in the first place."
You can read his excellent comments at his blog here: http://barrylyga.com/2012/07/aurora/
You know the media is going to blame everything but gun laws. They are going to blame violent movies and television and video games and entertainment. They are going to blame Batman, for Christ's sake. But nobody is going to dare piss off the NRA by saying what so many of us are thinking, which is that we need to do something about keeping weaponry out of the hands of loons. And don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-gun. My old man kept a rifle over the doorway in my childhood home the whole time I was growing up. I never once thought about loading it up and taking it TO THE MOVIES. None of us did. We were not insane.
As Barry said, I'm not anti-gun.
I'm anti-death.
Once again I am ashamed to live in a country which is so preoccupied with gun "rights" that we have allowed a tragedy of this magnitude to occur. I am ashamed to live in this country where we give so much press and negative energy to non-issues like abortion and gay marriage -- and yes, these are NON-ISSUES; if you don't like them, don't do them but damn it, keep your morality to yourself because it ISN'T MINE -- and yet refuse, year after year, to do anything about the proliferation of weapons. As blogger Barry Lyga said, more eloquently than I could have done, "anyone so brain-damaged as to walk into a movie theater with smoke grenades and a shotgun never should have been able to get his hands on smoke grenades and a shotgun in the first place."
You can read his excellent comments at his blog here: http://barrylyga.com/2012/07/aurora/
You know the media is going to blame everything but gun laws. They are going to blame violent movies and television and video games and entertainment. They are going to blame Batman, for Christ's sake. But nobody is going to dare piss off the NRA by saying what so many of us are thinking, which is that we need to do something about keeping weaponry out of the hands of loons. And don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-gun. My old man kept a rifle over the doorway in my childhood home the whole time I was growing up. I never once thought about loading it up and taking it TO THE MOVIES. None of us did. We were not insane.
As Barry said, I'm not anti-gun.
I'm anti-death.
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