Today's news coverage was depressing, but there was a ray of hope- an interview with survivors of the mass shooting in Florida instilled a sense of pride in me... these kids were compassionate, grateful, and defiant. Their parents have every right to be proud of them. The victims of the shooting were exactly the sort of people this nation needs, generous kids and valiant adults taken from their friends and loved ones by a nonentity who never should have been able to obtain a firearm.
Meanwhile, in the scummy precincts of the internet, the right-wing conspiracy crowd is trying to claim that the shooter was a registered Democrat and an antifascist, contrary to evidence, and the woman-hating contingent is trying to claim him as their latest anti-feminist hero. Needless to say, the Powers that Be won't do a goddamn thing about our mass shooting problem, with the number of 2018 shootings clocking in at thirty. As a matter of fact, Republicans in Congress want to lower the bar for concealed carry to the lax standards of the ungovernable Southron hinterlands- as a New Yorker, I don't want some creepy Florida Man type bringing his shooting irons into Times Square for a little turkey shoot/suicide by cop.
What the fuck would it take to have sanity prevail when it comes to the acquisition of firearms? Frankly, I'm a supporter of the Second Amendment, particularly the first clause, which tends to be elided by the NRA and their minions. I doubt that asshole shooter boy would have been able to last for a day in a bonafide well-regulated militia.
Your comments about the student survivors are spot on.
ReplyDeleteHowever, my three sons, my wife and I all share the same affinity, identification with the ostracized, marginalized, painfully shy soul, you know, the oddball and wallflower in every community. Isolative behavior is a feature of PTSD. This teenager's mortality-provoking event, loss of his mother, happened at a formative age when the morbidly pathological changes to personality may have been unavoidable and irreconcilable. Outcomes in similar circumstances such as major depression with psychotic features, borderline personality disorder, dissociative disorders, and sociopathy are more common than PTSD in his age group. And God knows the engagement of similarly afflicted individuals is extremely difficult, fraught with danger, often met with rejection and too frequently unsuccessful without institutionalizing the person. So, let's start by taking away the guns. The police offer no ameliorating alternative, only legitimated and militarized force.
I suspect after, like you, listening to those magnificently compassionate students, the loving sacrifice of self by their football coach and their superbly insightful superintendent that the path forward may be found among them for they evinced those traits necessary for any hope of timely preventative intervention, selflessness and unremitting empathy.
I am amazed by how political these kids are turning out to be. They aren't taking the torrent of BS talking points lying down.
ReplyDeleteActually, in the context of english grammar in the 18th century, he would have been REQUIRED to be in the militia. There were no standing armies in smaller countries, and when the community needed to respond to a danger - indiginous people attacking a village, a small war, criminal gangs etc - all able bodied men - the militia - were required (and mostly happily complied) to gather with their own horse, weapons, ammunition and gear. Nothing was issued, and at the end of hostilities they went back to their farms and businesses.
ReplyDeleteAlso, too, at that time 'well regulated' did NOT mean 'managed and controlled by government agency'. Rather, it meant 'well (or properly) functioning. In the context of the time, the reason they wanted to make certain that the 'right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' was that the people and their arms WERE the militia, and in order for it to function properly they had to HAVE those weapons.
And it's ludicrous to suggest that the wingnuts 'elide' this due to your popular although faulty interpretation of the 2nd amendment's phraseology. It has been repeatedly adjudicated in federal courts over the years, most recently in Heller.
Look, I'd love for this fairy tale interpretation to be true, but I refuse to believe things that are false just because it's convenient to me ideologically. That's something THEY do. The language used in the constitution has been researched deeply, and it's very easy to find out what the founders meant when they used certain words and phrases...