Xmas Xtravaganza

From what I understand, this is from several years ago. But, MOST. AWESOME. EVER.

Oh no, there goes Tokyo…

In Which I Discover Another Very Weird Corner of the Internets…

Back after a long hiatus in which I have been a) attempting to write a novel and b) generally pissing away my life…and what, you ask, brings me back?

Grossness, in a word. Don’t ask me how I found out about this or, ok, ask me how I found it, but don’t ask why I know more about it than I would with just a cursory glance.

I’ve long been fascinated with the very strange communities you find in out-of-the-way corners of the web – the Furries, for example.  About a month ago, I discovered a new one, when the YouTube threw up (literally) a link to the following, extremely gross video:

If you don’t want to watch it, believe me, I’ll understand.  Me, I couldn’t help myself. And then I found there are literally THOUSANDS of videos like this on YouTube.

So I watched some more of them. There are several things I found just absolutely fascinating about these: first, someone decided to take video and put it up on YouTube. But even more interesting is the fact that in most of them (that I’ve seen, anyway), there’s a big crowd of onlookers when the home surgery takes place.  Participants regularly make comments like “this is the best day of my life!” as they push and prod on their friends and loved ones to remove the pestilence from their bodies.  In the video above, there’s a group of KIDS watching all the fun and providing commentary from the peanut gallery.  It’s like these folks are calling up their friends and neighbors to come over and watch them cut open Bob’s cyst.  In some of them, the amateur doctors reference other “famous” YouTube cyst removal videos, referring to “Marco” (the patient in the video above) or with jokes about “make a bigger hole” referring to an unfortunate named Lou, who throughout his surgery exhorts his wife to, you guessed it, “make a bigger hole” so she can “clean out ALL that crap.”

Then there are the comments.  We all know that YouTube comments represent the worst the web has to offer…except, surprisingly, in the case of these home surgery videos.  Comments for these are usually hysterical.  Two that show up on a lot of the videos are “I came” and “how did I end up here?” and “I wish I was the one doing the squeezing.”  Even funnier are the ones where the commenters are upset by poor video quality, or a video not matching or living up to the promise of its title.  Imprecations about the hygiene and skills of the amateur doctors abound.  Marco came in for quite a bit of abuse for being a “nasty redneck” and a lot of folks wanted to kill Lou for his repeated admonishment to “make a bigger hole.”

And it’s not just amateurs getting in on the act: there’s an Indian doctor, Yadav Vikram, who has apparently become somewhat of a celebrity in this very strange subculture.  Viky does a lot of blackhead squeezing accompanied by commentary like “and now you can see like little worms coming out of the pores” (imagine in Indian-accented English for full effect).  Other videos were taken by friends or family members in a clinic or hospital, as real doctors do the honors.  In most of the ones I’ve seen, the intention to “put it up on YouTube” is openly expressed by either the practitioner or one of the onlookers, and they’ll often reference having already watched a lot of the videos already posted.

I started wondering, WTF?  Am I the only one who hasn’t been watching these things already?  And then came the crushing shame and embarrassment of admitting that yes, I am one of the sick fucks who are watching these things NOW.

Some of these things, I shit you not, feature a 70’s porno soundtrack.

Let that sink in for a moment.

…

So why write about it?  For a start, to expose my shame.  Shame’s one thing; hidden shame is a much worse one.  In my defense, watching these things is far from the worst or sickest thing I could have done, though granted I’m not setting the bar real high.

Why did I watch any of these in the first place?  First there’s the freakshow aspect.  You can see how Marco sucked me in to begin with – just the still frame for the video shows a man with a TIT on his BACK.  I’m powerless to resist something like that, which is why I watched – and made it all the way through – the TV presentation of The Man with the 132-lb Scrotum.  How are you NOT going to check into that?  And then, I have to admit that there’s something I find oddly satisfying about seeing a big ugly excrescence meet its end and purging a body of an imperfection – though it makes me feel a little dirty to admit it.

I’m certainly not recommending you watch any of these videos, even (or perhaps especially) the one posted above – but you might enjoy clicking through them to the comments.

Who knew that zit, cyst, and boil-popping enthusiasts were the funniest and most literate YouTube commenters?

R.I.P., Thanksgiving

While Sarah Palin and the brethren at Fox News valiantly carry on The War Against The War On Christmas, they somehow missed the death of Thanksgiving, which was itself – ironically – murdered by Christmas.  Perhaps that’s unfair since it’s not “Christmas” per se that killed Thanksgiving, but rather the corporate blindness to everything but profit and the perception that crashing the holiday would somehow give an edge to businesses that open on Thanksgiving.  One wonders how anyone gains an edge when everyone follows the herd to open on Thanksgiving, and I’m pretty sure that if all the stores remained closed on the holiday, their bottom lines for the season wouldn’t be any different.  People would just wait for the stupid “Black Friday” crush instead of foregoing turkey and dressing for the joys of camping in a cold Wal-Mart parking lot.

One thing is for sure, though:  the mindless consumers who packed the parking lots I passed yesterday have achieved on behalf of chain store owners something they would have never dreamed of achieving on their own.  They’ve managed to make shitty, low-wage jobs with unpredictable schedules even shittier, by taking away one of the only TWO days out of the 365 in the year that employees could predict with any certainty was a guaranteed day off.  Really, Staples?  An office supply store needs to be open on Thanksgiving?

Next up:  Wal-Mart seeks to cash in on after-holiday sales by opening at midnight on Christmas Day, and within 20 years Christmas is just another day where people fortunate enough to have fairly decent jobs go shopping, while for the poor schlubs who work at these places it’s just another work day.

This year, I am thankful that I do not work for rapacious fucks who can’t stand the thought of two whole days per year when they aren’t raking in money and lording their power over their wage slaves.  And, as always, I’m thankful for family and friends, among them Eartha Kitty, seen in the photos below trying to indulge her fetish for celery.  If I had gotten a shot off just a few seconds earlier, it would show her trying to climb into the bag of whole celery.  Instead she decided to vulture over the celery I was working on chopping for the dressing and bless it with a few cat hairs.  Thanks a lot, kitty.  Though to be fair, I should have taken precautions before I started chopping – the thing with the celery is nothing new.  The first time I brought some home after Eartha moved in, she tried to climb in the grocery bag to get at it.  There’s something about the smell that has a semi-catnip effect for her.

Hope you had a nice holiday too.

Who, me?

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…….celery!

Christmas Wishes Do Come True

Our Lady of Perpetual Butthurt, Sarah Palin, resurfaced the other day shooting word salad all over the airwaves via Fox News, ostensibly because she has a timely new ghost-written book out about how all the nasty liberals killed Christmas by impaling the baby Jesus on a Christmas tree.

Or something.  Frankly, it’s hard to interpret what she says any time words fall out of her mouth, even if you care.  And of course, not only do I not care, I wasn’t even paying attention, because I was too focused in on “what the fuck has Sarah Palin done to her face?”

For several years now, I have wished aloud that Sarah Palin would stay in the public eye just long enough to be tempted into unfortunate plastic surgery.  I had faith that the day would arrive sooner rather than later after her Big Gulp performance last year, in which she was unable to move her upper lip thanks to overdoing the botox; in the photos from that event the paralysis makes her look positively deranged.  Stupid, at the very least.  Take a look at where she is now:

Oh, goody!  I never thought she would go immediately to the drag queen brow lift, but she has!  And she’s paired it with a 70s style wig.

Now, I’ve taken a little heat for pointing out that she’s starting to look really bad thanks to all this ill-advised “work,” particularly from the more sensitive souls who frequent the Balloon Juice blog.  In principle, I agree that commenting on a person’s looks is non productive and unfair.  But that’s because most people haven’t, for the most part, chosen what they look like.  What about someone who looks ridiculous because they chose to have surgery, or because of what they’ve chosen to wear?  Not the same thing, say I.  The entire genesis of my wish regarding Palin was in fact the idea that it would be nice if the outside better reflected what’s on the inside.  She’s accomplished that with this brow lift – it gives her a harsh, mean look.  You can easily picture her as a Disney villainess.  Caribou Cruella, if you will.

But quicker minds than my own have been on the case.  Bob Cesca thought the new and improved face of Sarah Palin looked an awful lot like someone else, and I have to agree:

The difference is, Rob Lowe’s look was achieved with prosthetics and makeup; he’s not stuck with that face.

If she keeps going at the current rate, Sarah Palin will be the next Michael Jackson or Joan Rivers 5 years from now; if she wants to continue grifting gullible middle-aged-to-old white men, she doesn’t have much choice other than to continue to try to look several decades younger than she is.  Because once they stop looking at the packaging, there will be no escaping that there’s nothing of value in the package.

Much like the ancient Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times,” it’s hard to imagine a more karmic, fitting fate for Sarah Palin than the one dictated by the path she chose.

Behold the Power of …. Beets

My grandmother grew them in her garden, and as a child, I scarfed down a lot of pickled beets.  But they never became a part of my typical menu rotation as an adult.  Usually I have them only a couple of times a year at most.  Kyle fixes beets for the New Year dinner and they’re always lovely, but I guess due to my own unfamiliarity with how to prepare them, I’ve never cooked beets at home.

 

Now they’ve become a part of my daily routine.

Like everyone else, I’m daily learning the many joys of aging.  Most of the little aches and pains are nothing more than a nuisance, just a constant reminder that things ain’t what they used to be and they aren’t going to get better.  But I had become concerned about my rising blood pressure, measured several times in the past year in the low 140s.  That’s not what would be considered dangerously high – but it’s also not optimal, and if it follows the trajectory of the other physiological changes I’ve experienced, it will get worse.  Aches and pains are one thing – strokes are entirely another.  So this is something I decided I needed to be worried about, even though those low 140s readings were outliers.  More typically, I was seeing readings in the mid 130s and wanted to get them back to 120 or below.

Medical experts have concluded that blood pressure meds for slightly elevated pressure don’t show much appreciable effect over the long term, and I really would like to avoid having to take any kind of daily prescription medication, so I had tried CoQ10 supplements a while back after reading that they could bring blood pressure down around 10 points.  Unfortunately, I didn’t notice any improvement after several months of taking the supplement, so I continued to look for other things that might help.

Then a few weeks ago, I heard something about beet root juice helping to bring down blood pressure.  I looked into it, and determined that while it would be worth trying, it would be too expensive for me as a long term solution.  Beet root juice isn’t all that common so you’re looking at either ordering online or buying from a place like Whole Foods, at a cost of $15 or so for a 5 day supply. Then there’s the whole thing of drinking beet juice – the recommended dosage is 1 cup per day, and I imagine that it may not be the most delicious beverage around.  $90 a month is a lot to spend on something that you don’t really like.

So I thought, why not try beet powder?  It’s just dehydrated beets, so it’s got all the stuff that would be in the juice or the beets themselves.  I found some beet powder capsules on amazon and they were cheap, so I ordered them.  I took a blood pressure reading 3 or 4 days before I started taking the capsules and I was at 138/84.  Two weeks later, after taking the capsules for about 10 days, I took another reading…and was down to 107/74.

!!!AMAZEBALLS!!!

This was with a daily dosage of 6 capsules – approximately 1-1/2 teaspoons of beet powder, equivalent to eating 1-1/2 medium sized beets.  If you have any concerns about your blood pressure being too high, you need to give this a try.  It’s not a quack remedy; it’s actually scientifical.  Apparently there’s a compound in beets (nitrites or nitrates – like I said, this is scientifical, not scientific) that boost the levels of nitric oxide in the blood, and nitric oxide has the happy effect of relaxing blood vessel walls.  Bottom line – even if my before and after readings were outliers – that is, the before was higher than average and the after lower than average, I figure I still got at least a 20-point drop in my blood pressure within 10 days.  Compare that to the 10-point drop – or less – doctors hope to achieve with many of the prescription meds for reducing pressure, and it’s even more remarkable.

Of course, the first thing I did was email Dr. Lyta to tell her to add beet root powder to her Vitamin Manifesto.  Then I did what I always hoped I would never do – I sat down to write an Old Fart blog post.  Sorry about that, but I thought this was something that should be shared with friends, so hopefully it will help at least one person out of the five who read this blog.

Mustache Baby

My grandniece is now 13 months old and has been walking since 9 months (and running since 10 months).

You can’t see it so well in this photo thanks to the mustache, but this child looks exactly like a Kewpie doll, even down to the hair on top of the head (about all she’s got so far) and the little Kewpie doll smile.

See if you can’t see the resemblance:

And yes, she got the mustache pacifier from her Grandaunt Jennifer.

 

I’m FIFTY! FIFTY Years Old!

 

I can remember thinking this was really funny 15 years ago, when I was 35. 

Now, maybe not so much, because I can relate to the sentiment.  Even though I don’t like to kick, stretch, and kick.

Celebrating April Fool’s, One Day Early

When I posted about the Google doodle controversy yesterday, I missed what was the funniest point:  the rightwingtards were all up in arms in part because many of them thought the doodle was in honor of Hugo Chavez, not Cesar Chavez.  Oh well, what’s the difference?  They’re both brown.  And so Republican Latino outreach continues apace.

I got to wondering though, what with the portability of Easter, has it ever fallen on April 1?  What if the original Easter was just an April Fool’s joke?  If the post from yesterday doesn’t send me to hell, surely this latest musing will.

In the spirit of the day, I offer you this, which has been hanging around in My Pictures for quite some time now:

Happy April Fool’s Day!

He Is Risen

Back after a long hiatus, to wish you a happy Easter.

Faithful readers of this blog, all 12 of them, may recall the 3 Weird Sisters classic, “Touchdown Jesus” Smited from several years ago, in which a monumental tacky Jesus sculpture erected by an Ohio megachurch was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.

Well, several months ago that church finished their new tacky monumental statue to replace the one that burned, and I have been saving the pictures from then until today just so I could use this headline.  Behold the new, and one presumes, fireproof Jesus:

Zombie Jesus wants your braaaaanes….

Which of course reminds me of this classic from the lamentably departed Poor Man:

This, however, is my favorite picture of the resurrection of the giant tacky megachurch Jesus statue:

Hey! Bring that BACK!

Easter is, I must admit, about the most impenetrable holiday for me.  The meaning, for those of us raised in homes that were at most religiously apathetic, extends to bunnies, baskets of goodies, and hunting for hidden eggs; in that context, it’s a holiday you outgrow in adolescence.  It becomes even more confusing when you consider the way it moves around on the calendar.  Then there’s the whole thing about breaking out the white shoes, buying new outfits, and celebrating by eating ham of all things, which Jesus as a Jew would not have eaten.  Maybe the message there is that after he died for our sins and was resurrected, the reward was bacon.  Well, as Eddie Izzard says in the clip below, you tell me.

Alternately, because wordpress apparently no longer supports youtube videos, see it here.

Also, because what would a religious holiday be without rightwinger outraged butthurt, the culture wars have erupted all over Fox News and the nutosphere, thanks to Google’s unconscionable recognition of the day as Cesar Chavez’ birthday, 20 years after his death.  The offending doodle:

On Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy (or as I call it, Tweaker) conservative alternative to Twitter, it was suggested that Google could have used a more holiday-appropriate theme, such as eggs, which of course reminded me of the Eddie Izzard bit above.  As I told one complainant in blog comments elsewhere, who insisted the doodle was a “slap in the face” to Christians and claimed that from here on out, he would be using bing as his search engine…”so, what you’re telling us is that Google, a private company, only recognized your portable religious holiday with a doodle on the date in the past 14 out of 15 years, but because they skipped one year, it’s a slap in the face and you’re going to switch to using an inferior product for conducting web searches as a result?  That’s a pretty weak-sauce version of getting thrown to the lions, bro.”  Funny how flexible that idea of a “free market” is when the actors in it don’t mindlessly conform to the religious preferences/prejudices of the conservatives who are its most ardent defenders.

Silly me.  I should know by now that Easter, like Christmas, is meant to remind us of the untold suffering and oppression the Christian majority in this country has endured as a result of the fact that not everyone believes exactly the same things they do.

About the Guns

In the week since the horrific events at Sandy Hook Elementary, we’ve heard a lot of crazy ideas (as we do in the wake of every mass shooting)  about how best to protect innocent unarmed civilians from nutters with guns.  Today we’ll be hearing from the NRA, whose position we already know will be that “guns don’t kill people; crazy people with guns kill people.”  A true statement, but one that doesn’t solve or even suggest a solution, which would have to involve keeping the most lethal weapons out of the hands of crazy people, which is a bridge too far for the NRA.*

There’s a genuine conflict here:  we do have a constitutional amendment guaranteeing people the right to own guns.  Clearly we aren’t going to be able to declare all of them illegal and force people to hand all of them over.  Even if we could, I don’t think I would favor it – there are millions of hunters in the country and many millions more who are responsible gun owners, who keep their weapons secure and own them only for home protection.  In many cases, this is an imagined need, but nonetheless it’s one that’s not entirely unreasonable and it’s a right that goes all the way back to British common law, which makes it a bit hard to argue against from a legal standpoint.

By and large, hunters and the owners of well-secured guns kept for home protection aren’t the problem.  They also aren’t the ones buying semi-automatic weapons.  Let’s be honest:  a semi-automatic rifle or handgun is an offensive weapon designed for military use, and as such, is not an appropriate weapon to allow anyone and everyone to own.  There’s a contingent of crazy that insists that one of the things the Founders had in mind when drafting the Second Amendment was keeping citizens armed in case of the need to overthrow a tyrannical government.  Again, there may be truth in this – the Founders themselves had only recently thrown off a government they considered to be tyrannical, though its offenses and predations fell far short of the tyrannies we’ve seen enacted over and over again in the modern world.

Consider the context:  the Founders lived in a time where the most powerful personal weapon was a muzzle-loader, which could fire off one shot every couple of minutes, or perhaps once per minute if the guy handling it was particularly adept at re-loading.  It was an age where parity in firepower was possible – a group of average citizens, all armed with muzzle-loaders, would, with the exception of cannons, be as well-armed as an organized military of the same numbers.

That parity is not possible these days and indeed hasn’t been for a century or more.  It goes without saying that it wouldn’t be desirable, either.  We can’t very well allow every citizen the right to own and keep any variety of weapons, including but not limited to hand grenades, shoulder-fired rocket launchers, or nuclear warheads.  Those are all “arms” as well, and somehow we’re able to agree that not everyone should have them and that there are no legal uses for them outside of a battlefield.

So why the hangup when it comes to semi-automatic weapons?  They aren’t used for hunting, and for home protection you don’t need something that can fire off 30 – 100 rounds per minute.  In fact, while handguns are the weapons most often chosen for home protection purposes, for most people, a shotgun would be a better choice, owing to less need for accurate aim (and really, just playing a recording of a shotgun being pumped would be enough to persuade all criminals aside from psychopaths to clear the premises immediately).

Once we’ve ruled out hunting and home protection, the semi-automatic’s sole use is unavoidable:  it is an offensive weapon, not intended for personal defense so much as for killing the other guy.  Given that murder remains illegal, it’s insane to insist that a weapon designed solely for killing multiple human beings in a minute or less should be readily available and legal to own for an average citizen.  About the only purpose I’ve heard gun enthusiasts advance for which these types of weapons might have even a borderline legitimacy is that they are “fun to shoot.”  Perhaps so, but the Second Amendment isn’t concerned with your personal enjoyment of any particular weapon; as such, I’d have to say that the right of crowds of citizens to not be slaughtered greatly outweighs any “fun” an enthusiast might experience in firing one of these weapons at a shooting range or elsewhere.  People who have a burning desire to handle these types of weapons have the option of joining the military; outside of that, they don’t need to be handling them.

As for those who persist in clinging to the idea that they have a “right” to own these types of weapons in the event that the evil gubmint gets too oppressive what with the seat-belts and the motorcycle helmet and the required food labeling laws and so forth, add them to the mental health registry:  their belief that they could, with a semi-automatic weapon, fight off the fighter jets, targeted missiles, tanks, and other weaponry in our awesome military arsenal should the need arise, clearly marks them out as both paranoid and delusional; they are precisely the type of people who should NOT be running around with powerful, rapid-fire weapons.

Here’s the thing:  the Second Amendment says you have the right to own and keep a gun.  It doesn’t say what type of gun, and none of the guns in production today could have been anticipated by the Founders.  If pistols were available in the late 1700’s, they had only recently come on the scene; certainly there was no gun at the time capable of firing more than one shot without being re-loaded.  The Second Amendment could be interpreted as the right to own a more modernized version of the single-shot firearms available when the Amendment was drafted, and nothing else – if we had a sane majority on the Supreme Court or in our political discourse.  Instead, we’ll probably spend the next weeks, months, and perhaps even years listening to ridiculous suggestions about how we can turn every public space into an armed camp to “protect” us against armed lunatics who should never have access to weapons in the first place, instead of dealing with the issue of having too many, too powerful, guns floating around.  Already ruled out is the idea for a real ban on semi-automatics such as the one used in last Friday’s shooting; we are told that even a ban on future sales of these weapons would do nothing to take care of the estimated 8 million of them already in citizens’ hands.  In other words, a buy-back program coupled with hefty fines for anyone caught with one after the deadline for turning them in, as was successful in Australia, is off the table.  We don’t know what number of murdered children would be required in order to even begin a serious political discussion about taking this very reasonable step, but the correct answer to the question is obviously “> 20.”

I’m not going to belabor the transparent insanity of the suggestions being put forward by those who value cold hard steel more than young children’s lives, but I will briefly recount them.  First there’s the camp who believes that the answer to mass shootings is more guns.  According to these fine patriots, if all of us were packing heat, some citizen-Rambo would pick off the crazy guy with the gun before the body count gets too high.  Never mind that never, not even once, has an armed civilian stopped a mass shooting by taking out the gunman.  There have been a few times in low-profile cases where an off-duty policeman, former Marine, or other individual with career training in handling firearms stepped in and stopped a bad guy; there are about as many similar cases in which the would-be hero either almost shot the wrong guy or determined that an innocent bystander would be at risk if he took the shot.  In other words, thanks to these guys not being average civilians with guns, the gunman was stopped without harm to innocent parties.  Substituting the average citizen into these scenarios, most of whom have had nothing like the extensive training of police or members of the military, the likelihood in these scenarios is that even more people would get shot in the crossfire, law enforcement arriving on scene might mistake the hero for the bad guy, and so on and so forth.  That’s all true, but beside the point, which is:  your right to own a weapon designed for offensive purposes does not trump MY right to not live in the Wild West or an armed camp.  There’s nothing in the Second Amendment to suggest that it trumps the express goal of the overall document, which I will remind the brethren, is to:

“…insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty…”

I feel that continuing to indulge the fetishes of a fringe group of maladapted, insecure and fearful people endangers or denies all of the above goals to the great majority of people in this country.

 

Then there are the proposals to turn schools into windowless bunkers patrolled by pistol-packing teachers and other school personnel.  This one is interesting primarily because it’s being advanced by the same folks who insist teachers are a bunch of overpaid incompetent boobs – but you can count on them to handle a gun around your kids every day! 

We’ve heard again how “an armed society is a polite society,” for all values of “polite” which equal “being afraid to say anything out of fear that the gun-toting Cletus at the next table in the bar might disagree.” 

The final, the piece de resistance of dumbassitude, goes to one Megan McArdle, formerly of The Atlantic, now decamped to The Daily Beast (Tina Brown sure knows how to pick them, doesn’t she?), who suggested that we should teach children in this situation to rush the shooter.  Because, according to Megs, it will unbalance him and throw him off if a bunch of people, even small ones, are running at him from different directions.  It’s also a sneaky way of blaming the victims – in this case six- and seven-year olds – for failing to save themselves when a guy who had no business with any type of  gun managed to get his hands on a very powerful – and legal – one.

That’s an awful lot of flailing FAIL to go through to arrive at the conclusion that the only thing that CAN’T be part of the problem is the gun itself, despite the fact that in these mass shootings, the gun is a tool performing the function for which it was designed, and that function is an illegal act for civilians.

We don’t have to put up with this crap.  We can insist on reasonable gun laws which both protect the rights of sportsmen and people to be secure in their homes while recognizing that some weapons have no place in civilian society.  We can insist on background checks for any sale or trade of arms at any venue.  We can insist that gun buyers be required to register their weapons, and that they demonstrate that they’ve completed some sort of training on safe handling and keeping of firearms, in order for those weapons to be legal.  We can insist on not just a ban, but a buy-back program designed to get most of the most lethal weapons out of circulation.  We can insist on a law that imposes heavy fines upon people found to have those types of weapons after a specific buy-back deadline.  It won’t get them all off the street, but getting 75 – 90% of them would be a good start.  Sure, criminals will continue to get these types of weapons – but it’s not criminals who have been shooting up our congressional meet-and-greets, our movie theaters, our houses of worship, our malls, and our schools.  Criminals use guns primarily to help them obtain money or other goods illegally – they aren’t interested in shooting little kids, or really anyone else, unless it furthers that goal.  Crime is down overall, while mass shootings are up, and none of the gunmen in these cases have been hard-core criminals.  If these types can’t get their weapons legally, they’re not likely to get them at all.

Finally, we can insist that the right of the majority for domestic tranquility trumps the right of a vocal minority to own a tool for which there is no constructive legal purpose.

In closing, I’ll note that I lived a full third of my life in a home that was a virtual arsenal of guns.  My father was an avid collector – mostly of military-issue guns from WWI and WWII – and other military paraphernalia.  He didn’t have any semi-automatics, because he was more a collector than a “mah gun gives me POWER” fetishist.  I have no idea how many guns Dad had, but when they were auctioned after his death almost 20 years ago, they went for over $75,000.  In short, it was a lot of guns.  He wasn’t a hunter and he rarely took out any of the guns and fired them.  He did occasionally target practice at a gun range or other safe location, and for a time, he headed up a group for teenagers wanting to learn target shooting.  The entire time I lived in the same house with him, I never saw a gun lying around unattended.  In fact, I never saw a gun unless he had it out and was in the same room with it.  If I had seen one out, I already knew that I wasn’t to touch it.  I learned how to shoot, but also knew I was never to have a gun in my hand unless my Dad was there and had handed it to me.

But the guns were a constant menace anyway.  When we lived in Georgia, he stored his collection in an attic space that was fairly easy for him to access, and which he kept securely locked.  After the move to Arkansas, he had no appropriate place in the house to store them, and so for the last 15 years of his life, they were packed away in crates that took up one end of the family room.  We were instructed from a very young age to never tell anyone about Dad’s guns.  They weren’t even insured, because Dad didn’t want anyone knowing about all of them.  His fear was more about robbery than government.  So I grew up surrounded by an arsenal, which didn’t make me feel any safer; we were far more likely to be murdered by gun thieves than by anything else.

After Dad died, the guns worried me even more, because now my Mom was alone in the house with a commodity eagerly sought-after by criminals.  She contacted an auctioneer with some expertise in weapons, and within a year of my Dad’s death, the collection was auctioned off in Illinois.  It provided a great sense of relief to all of us.

Just a few years after my Dad’s death, a gun collector in a town about 40 miles away went missing with his wife and young daughter at the same time his gun collection went missing.  Some months later, the family’s bodies were discovered in their vehicle, submerged in an abandoned flooded gravel pit.  The crime was eventually traced to white supremacist  Chevy Kehoe, after his infamous shoot-out with Ohio police.  Proceeds from the theft went to fund terrorist activities, including bombing a government building.  Just a few months after Dad’s death, there was another robbery in a town only 75 miles away.  No one was murdered in that theft, but the proceeds from it went to fund the Oklahoma City bombing.  The trail of violence and terror from the flood of guns in this country doesn’t end with the guns themselves.

Before Dad’s collection went to auction, Mom offered each of us the chance to select anything we’d like to have.  I didn’t choose anything.  Even one gun in close proximity would make me feel less secure than not having one.

*The NRA held its non-apologia before I was finished drafting this post; as expected, the guns aren’t the problem.  It’s the mentally ill; better to compile a list of them than to stigmatize people who want to own deadly weapons by forcing them to register them.  Video games are the problem; that’s why all those kids are dead. 

Mom and I had a discussion a few days following the Sandy Hook shootings.  She said this event was finally going to change things; I was less sanguine.  But something about that press conference felt like a Schiavo Moment.  At one point, LaPierre is actually advocating for armed volunteers to police our schools.  The insurance premiums to cover the risks associated with having armed non-employees on school property when children are present…well, he didn’t offer any advice on where schools should go for the millions of dollars that would be required for that, should anyone be stupid enough to take such a dumbshit idea seriously and try to implement it.

Enough is enough.  It’s time, and well past the point, for us to stop allowing the radical, the paranoid and the profiteers to dictate what our policy will be.  They can only get away with it again if we don’t speak up and demand that they accept responsibility, and the limits to freedom that it sometimes requires in the real world.