A Moment of Silence

Which is what we get when we need politicians to say something meaningful about gun violence…

As we say in the news business when we don’t have all the facts or understand what the hell just happened, here’s what we know so far:

1. It’s really hard to get a million people together without at least two knuckleheads showing up.

2. Generally speaking, most people can’t shoot for shit.

3. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” is a load of BS offered up by people who make money off guns because having 850 cops at the Super Bowl parade didn’t stop 23 football fans from getting shot.

The cartoon you just looked at was originally titled “The Super Bowl Parade” but I decided to change the title because the people and organizations depicted have clearly won the battle over guns and if you think someone shooting up a Super Bowl Celebration parade is going to make politicians change a damn thing, I think you’re dreaming.

The people who make money off guns have already shown they don’t care when a school full of kids gets shot up, so I’m pretty sure they won’t take action just because some football fans got in the way of what seems like an extraordinary amount of stray bullets.

More on that in the very near future, but right now…

Timeout for some Wayne LaPierre News

According to the Associated Press, New York state Attorney General Letitia James brought a lawsuit against the National Rifle Association, its former CEO Wayne LaPierre and three other NRA officials we never heard of and the lawsuit claims the NRA officials misspent millions of dollars of the nonprofit’s funds on lavish perks for themselves.

The lawsuit argues that LaPierre dodged financial disclosure requirements while using the NRA as his personal piggy bank to pay for things like African safaris because apparently there just aren’t enough interesting animals to shoot here in America. (OK, that’s a supposition because I guess you could go on African safaris and not shoot animals, but that would probably violate some semi-obscure NRA bylaw.)

Also according to the lawsuit:

LaPierre billed the NRA more than $11 million for private jet flights and spent over $500,000 on eight trips to the Bahamas over a three-year span and authorized over $135 million in vendor contracts and then those happy vendors gave Wayne free trips to the Bahamas, Greece, Dubai and India and access to a 108-foot yacht.

I list all that because if true, that’s the tradeoff: apparently it’s worth 23 football fans getting shot if people like Wayne LaPierre get to live the lifestyle they’d like to grow accustomed to.

Also if true?  

Wayne ought to go on at least one more African safari, this time accompanied by the parents of kids who have been shot by the guns he wanted everyone to have and those parents should be armed with some of the same guns LaPierre likes so much and then Wayne should be stripped naked and told to start running and then he and those parents could reenact the 1965 film The Naked Prey.

A fantasy scenario that demonstrates why political cartoonists are so rarely put in charge of justice systems, although I tend to believe at least 23 Super Bowl parade shooting victims and/or their families wouldn’t mind watching that either.

Too Many Guns or Not Enough?

So here’s my position on guns: nobody (including me) is talking about taking rifles or shotguns away from people and certain people ought to be able to own handguns, but most of us have a better chance of shooting ourselves, a family member or a hole in our flat-screen TV than whipping out a .357 and plugging Charlie Manson climbing through a window.

We’ve all watched way too many movies and believe far too much of what we’ve seen, like it being possible to shoot a gun out of someone’s hand, when in reality you’d be much more likely to hit whom or whatever had the bad luck to be positioned behind the hand you’re aiming at.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I went over to a friend’s house and he had a .45 automatic and asked if I wanted to shoot it and I did, so we threw an empty plastic milk jug on his front lawn and tried to shoot it (he lived way out in the country) and the results of that experiment convinced me the safest place you could possibly be was holding the plastic milk jug.

Unless you practice and practice a lot you’re not going to hit much of anything and now throw in adrenaline, fear and panic and everything gets much worse and trained policemen have the same problem.

There’s no shortage of Police-Shoot-Wrong-Guy-In-A-Panic stories and according to the U.S. Naval Institute website, in Desert Storm “friendly fire” (getting hit by your own guys) made up 23% to 17% percent of casualties (depending on how you calculate it) so if people in the military who are extensively trained in the use of weapons still hit the wrong target nearly one-in-four times, what makes anybody think untrained people who watched one too many Die Hard movies and then got jacked up on Red Bull and vodka will do any better?

If you’ve heard “friendly fire” only accounts for 2% of military casualties, here’s the Naval Institute article that explains why that’s wrong and how and why the U.S. military has promoted a statistic that makes them look less incompetent:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1994/june/friendly-fire-facts-myths-and-misperceptions

The people who make money off guns promote the idea that more guns make us safer, but I think more guns means actually more accidents and more arguments that might have ended in a fist fight and bad feelings, ending in the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

After the shootings Republicans express great concern…for the guns

As usual Republican politicians expressed more concern for gun-makers than the people who got shot.

For example:

Missouri Sen. Bill Eigel used the occasion to warn everybody about “liberal gun grabbers” and promote gun ownership because the real problem is there just weren’t enough guns at the parade and went on to say: “One good guy with a gun could have stopped the evil criminals who opened fire on the crowd immediately.”

So apparently Kansas City’s mistake was having 850 policeman at the parade which, according to the Eigel’s Good Guy theory, is 849 policemen too many.

In 2021 Republican Governor and All-Around Neanderthal Mike Parson signed a bill that said certain federal gun laws are “invalid” if they don’t have a state-level equivalent, a law that passed over the objections of those “liberal gun grabbers” — the police.

Here’s a position paper from the International Association of Chiefs of Police and turns out they support a lot of the same gun control ideas promoted by liberal gun grabbers:

https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2018-08/IACP%20Firearms%20Position%20Paper_2018.pdf

Maybe that because, unlike politicians who spout this guns-make-us-safer crap, the police are the ones who have to deal with drunks, pissed-off spouses and people who think it’s a really great idea to bring guns to a Super Bowl parade.

After the Super Bowl parade shooting Gov. Parson didn’t want to talk about guns or what we can do about gun violence and neither did Missouri House Speaker, Republican Dean Plocher, who said “laws alone don’t solve the problem” which is completely accurate when you refuse to pass any that would make it harder to get a gun.

Missouri Republican Representative Mark Alford said, “You can’t lay the blame at the feet of the gun. It’s at the feet of the people who did this.”

Which is also completely accurate if you include the people who have refused to do anything about gun violence and have in fact tried to make sure there are even more guns in society and any half-wit can get one.   

Missouri allows carrying concealed weapons without a permit and semi-recently lowered the age for carrying one to 19 years old.

But wait, there’s more.

The Great State of Missouri does not have a minimum age requirement for possessing a firearm and if you truly believe the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed — even a little bit — then you must believe it’s OK for your kindergartener to own a rocket launcher which would make things a lot more interesting next time a first-grader steals his lunch money.

But despite our loose laws, apparently there still aren’t enough guns available, so some Missouri Republicans have been pushing for legislation that would allow people to carry concealed weapons on public transit and inside churches because you never know when you’re going to need to shoot a fellow commuter or an off-key church choir member.

If the average IQ is 100 (and it is) that means millions of Americans are running around with two-digit IQs and the people who promote gun ownership are saying let’s arm those dumbbells and we’ll all be safer.

In conclusion

In an episode of the TV classic All in the Family, Right-Wing Conservative Archie Bunker advocated stopping hijackers by giving a gun to every passenger.

In the 1970s that was considered such a ridiculous and outrageous position it was played for laughs, but we’ve advanced to the point where it’s now the position of the NRA and Republican politicians who want to suck up to the gun lobby.

And if you expect any of them to speak up and say this is getting nuts so just maybe we need to do something different, don’t hold your breath because all you’re going to get is…

A moment of silence.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/