Tag: gun control

  • gun culture

    Let’s think about the whole gun control question from another angle for just a moment. Imagine everybody has their own nuclear device.

    The Constitution enshrines our right to own these nuclear bombs and besides, we need our nuclear bombs in case the Government one day comes for us and we need to form a militia.



    The fact that many backyard nuclear bombs are detonated by toddlers who find them lying unlocked in their parents’ closets is immaterial. We will hold to our weapons until life is prised from our cold, dead land. All we have to do is rely on each and every fellow American to use their nuclear bomb sparingly, wisely, responsibly, and well. We simply trust every citizen to remain aware at every moment, even when humiliated, angry, drunk, sleep-deprived, heartbroken or feeling insecure, of the catastrophic long-term consequences of this short-term stress relief.



    I can’t see how this is ever going to work. It doesn’t even work with lemonade.

  • by appearance

    A man in front of me got up from his bench and ambled towards the train. He was huge and had that loping, awkward walk of a boy who’s been called too big all of his life. I’d say 6’5″ or 6″. As we both sat down on opposite benches he pulled out a book and started to read. I was reading, too, in fact, hearteningly, several books appeared on that ride but the truth is I spent as much time stealing covert glances as concentrating on Mary Stuart’s court. This man was dressed in giant red sneakers, a sloppy, comfortable tracksuit, baseball cap. He was black. In America I imagine he’d have been in danger of being shot for the crime of Being Tall Whilst Black. The expression of gentleness on his face and the shy way he held his head, his utter concentration on the page, made me love him. The temptation to go up and say, Excuse me, you just have such a beautiful, gentle spirit I just wanted to say hello, was very strong. Only respect for his reading and his solitude prevented me interrupting him as I got off. And I didn’t want to make him speak out about himself in front of all those people when he was staying behind and riding further, and I was leaving: it seems aggressive, it would have made him conspicuous in a lifetime where clearly conspicuousness had been a burden. I would so have loved to know what he was reading.

  • controlled by guns

    I don’t know why there’s not more discussion about the connection between entitlement and mass shootings. “Something went wrong in my life, something didn’t go the way I wanted it to, I deserve everything to go my way, and when it doesn’t, other people deserve to pay for what I didn’t get.” It’s sickening and it’s in the way men are raised and treated. To those men – the quiet majority – who do not exert their entitlement-from-birth to throw acid in the faces of women who’ve rejected them, ruin the lives of wives who leave them, or gun down random strangers who somehow owe them because life is unkind – I salute you. We need you. Speak up.

  • berserker

    berserker

    Yesterday walking down a very Turkish street I saw four groups of boys, one after the other, carrying large, menacing, (plastic) bazookas. One held his fake sub-machine gun to his friend’s head as the friend squirmed and several times tried to bat it away. An eight-year old carrying the Ramadan bread tucked it under his arm and pulling a pistol from his pocket shot his five-year-old brother in the face. Then they both walked on, their pistols bulging in the pockets, carrying the bread of God and guns like it was nothing.

    H2O HoL gorlitzer park boys