If you think this finally makes your point about laws and regulations or illustrates the need for liberty and rights, get over it. It doesn't. It shows the need for love, forgiveness and understanding.
And if some crazy blogger who uses his deceased cat as a pen name isn't enough, here's St. Teresa of Calcutta accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. If that's not a mic drop, nothing is.
"is not a time to whip out our favorite political hobby horses"
ReplyDeleteIf by this you mean, everyone should wait until all the facts are in (and think about what they mean) before shooting their mouths off, then yes, I agree completely. If anything is to be done to prevent people from committing massacres, it needs to be based on what actually happened and on what factors made it possible. It shouldn't get used to whip up a panic to ram through a bunch of regulations that are completely unrelated and would have done nothing to prevent it.
But, there are a substantial number of people who I suspect want us to "keep politics out of it" [1] because they just want to wait for the furor to die down before they quietly sweep the whole thing under the rug and forget about it. And that I do not agree with. Either propose doing something constructive, or give reasons for keeping things the way they are, but at least be straight about which it is they are doing.
[1] I suspect this because many of these people have been among the first to bring in politics when something horrific happened that *supported* their particular hobby horses.
A guy goes bananas and shoots up a crowd in Vegas and it results in public rage on both sides. The left wants to seize all guns, which isn't going to happen. The right can't bring itself to acknowledge gun violence at all in any meaningful sense. The only real result is one person's rage translates into millions of people raging at each other. Hence, St. Francis' Prayer.
ReplyDelete"They just want to wait for the furor to die down before they quietly sweep the whole thing under the rug and forget about it" pretty well sums up my meta-analysis of what I'm seeing from the right. And then on the left, you get some pretty big names saying they were happy to see country fans, who are almost all white and conservative, getting shot. It's all rage and rage-enabling all the time.
Your illustration reminded me of junior high choir. We sang that song for competition. I was an Alto. We sang pretty much one note. Such is the lot of an Alto. But it was a good memory. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteBTW, it was a public school. We've never been allowed to some it today.
Forget it? No.
ReplyDeleteDraw useful solutions, rather than walking into a barn and shutting one gate after verifying the horse is gone? Definitely.
Take away the guns...and a concert is still a high-value target. They have, presumably, protected against ground level attacks (vehicles through the fence, bombs or personal weapons through the gate).
Now this demonstrates that stuff bypassing the fence is an issue-- and the solution is to look at one, relatively low impact method to prevent it? (Think about a couple of explosives lobbed into the crowd, various slingshot routes, or God forbid if the guy had used his pilot's license and one of his planes to do a version of Nice, France.)
On the ship, every time something went wrong the "solution" was to lock down the E5 and below. Two guys got in a fight on the dock? Lock down for a week. Guys got in a fight on town? Lockdown for a week. Two guys skipped a mando-fun day and purse-snatched? Lockdown for a week. An officer and a chief(E7) got drunk together and beat up the cab driver when they figured out they didn't have the money to pay him? Lockdown for a week for E6 and below.
Did it stop anything?
No, not really, and in most cases the "solution" wasn't even related to the problem, and the costs of the "solution" were mostly ignored because the guys instituting the solution weren't losing anything they cared about.