Guns (addendum to blog post below this one)

Yes, I know there are people who have actual good reasons for owning a gun.
(See the post below, where it may have seemed I don't know that)
There really aren't that many of them, but sure, so don't tell me I'm not noticing that.
There are people with dangerous professions, like District Attorneys -- they make enemies.
People who are good targets to rob like diamond couriers.
But not that many.

But the movers and shakers of the 20th century (and in many cases, the 19th) really rang the bell for destructive stuff because it made money even if it fucked up people and places and our world -- oil-burning vehicles, guns, pesticides, financial finagling, et al. (Some of which looked like really good things and only LATER did people begin to realize they were fucking up the world.)

They rang that bell until they bent that bell and it doesn't ring any more, and so now they're down to yelling and accusing and predicting dire events, because they don't want to walk away from the money spigot.

"Class warfare!!" "Job killers!!" "God haters!!" "Reverse racists!" "Economic collapse!!"

Silly, because anyone clever enough to design and make a gun, a rifle, an automatic weapon, is clever enough to design and make other things, like refrigerators, electric cars, solar heating, etc.

And the pimps of the industry -- the ones who make nothing but deals? They will actually find it easier than the engineers to find a new high-paying job pimping for something else most people don't need. The engineers will have to have actual ideas. So the pimps have to keep selling those guns, because thinking up something new is too hard for them and maybe the new idea engineers might want new idea pimps.

And they have lots and lots of help convincing so many people to think they need guns.

News people tell them daily body counts -- of all the things that might have happened in Africa this week -- kids entering college -- first in their families to go, little Catholic kids receiving first communion, boys a little older and Jewish getting Bar Mitzvah'd, doctors saving lives, male and female virgins having their first sex, happy loving ecstasies, a medical missionary gone almost completely blind from River Blindness, getting stabilized in London at Saint Pancras, with 25% vision left in one eye, going back to Africa to return to doctoring the locals  ... do they tell us about that? Nope -- they tell us about a shootout in a shopping center-- 39  DEAD!! AND MORE EXPECTED TO DIE!!!  (Yeehah!)


TV shows tell them every way they can: "Don't go out there. People will kill you. Stay at home with your Friends. Nope -- that's not safe anymore. Lock your doors, people will break in and kill you." And the more people who buy that monstrous crap, the more that network can charge for advertisers who figure they might be willing to buy some other form of crap.

And they use the same tactics -- scare the bejeezus out of them -- it used to be halitosis and B.O.
And then it was no one will like you if you have grey hair, the wrong clothes, drink the wrong beer, short eyelashes, unshiny hair, small breasts, fat butts.
And now it's soft-dick can't get it up penis fatigue, natural decrease of testosterone, wrinkles -- but still "Someone is coming to take stuff away from you -- your crappy light beer, your artery-clogging breakfast food ." Or  "Pretty girls with nice hair who don't need bras will fuck you if you drink the right beer. Really. Even though they find you creepily repugnant now. That's because you drink the wrong beer. And if you drink the wrong beer, all those cheerful guys who drink the RIGHT beer will beat the crap out of you. A word to the idiot."
NO ONE WILL LIKE YOU AND THEY'LL PUT YOU OUT ON AN ICE FLOE TO DIE!!!!

Politicians insisting the OTHER guy, the OTHER party wants to put everyone in prison camps, wants to take away your money and your TV sets and your cars and your Big Gulps and your heart attack food. They want to give those good things to their own people, people not like you. They only want to give you Medical Insurance so they can refuse to treat you and kill you. They love the terrorists. HE'S a COMMUNIST!!!  HE'S A FASCIST!!! And where does THAT scare go after the election? Because one of them will get elected. And it doesn't go away. It hangs there like smog in the L.A. Basin.

It's not like no one noticed it -- a TV newsman saw it and talked about it in the late 60's.

Imagine that -- it took the LIBERAL news channels on cable THREE YEARS for anyone to even SUGGEST there MIGHT BE some racism in the Republican opposition to all things Obama -- and it was a guest who said it and who shocked the LIBERAL anchor.

But Eric Severeid pointed it out at the dawn of the Nixon Adminstration:

"The biggest business in America is not steel,  automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture,  refinement and distribution of anxiety ... Logically extended, this process can only  terminate in a mass  nervous breakdown  or in a collective condition of resentment..."

Welcome to the 21st century.

Here we are dragging our 18th, 19th,20th century fears with us.

So get a gun. Actually, get 2 guns, or 3 or 5 or more...

Because the number of people buying guns is going down (is that a bit of sunlight in the area of mental health?) but the NUMBER OF GUNS being sold is going up (is that like crazy is a fixed amount and if one person loses it another gains the extra?)

Who knows?  I don't.

There's no heaven or hell -- just one big fucking madhouse.

And guns don't make it better.