"Now fill the world with music, love and pride"

For my money, these are the two most cogent responses to the horror in Orlando.

Thoughts and Prayers, by John Scalzi

“I offer my thoughts and prayers.”

Thank you.

It’s not enough.

It never was.

What more do you have to offer?

Recipe for a Shooting, by Chuck Wendig

You’re special.

Those people aren’t like you.

They’re your enemy.

You get to have what you want.

You get to do what you want, take what you want.

(Nobody will do anything to stop you anyway.)

Just don’t cry. Don’t feel. Bottle it all up.

God says it’s okay.

The law says it’s okay.

Long as you’re a man, a manly man, not a pussy, not a queer.

Here, now. Have your gun. Go on, take it.

Don’t use it, of course.

Wink, wink.

Don’t use it.

Don’t stray.

Those are your enemies.

Here is your gun.

And there is this.

The World Stands With Orlando

(Title: From Lin-Manuel Miranda's sonnet, read Sunday night at the Tony Awards.)

Call Me Young Gun

Each night I go to bed
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
No, I ain't lookin' for forgiveness
But before I'm six foot deep
Lord, I got to ask a favor
And I'll hope you'll understand
'Cause I've lived life to the fullest
Let this boy die like a man
Starin' down a bullet
Let me make my final stand

"Blaze of Glory," music/lyrics by Jon Bon Jovi

I actually wasn't going to comment on this numbnut taking his AR-15 into Sky Harbor International Airport while purchasing his coffee (the better to protect himself from the gremlins waiting to steal it, I suppose), until this was published in the Arizona Republic today. But once I read about this gun rights advocate idjit Alan Korwin, I couldn't resist.

Seriously, where did the reporter find this guy? I have seldom seem a better example of a bug-eyed, paranoid gun freak.

Gun rights advocate Alan Korwin said Peter Nathan Steinmetz was perfectly within his rights to bring the rifle into the public section of the airport: only the area behind the Transportation Security Administration security checkpoint is a "gun free zone.''

Phoenix Police Sgt. Steve Martos doesn't disagree, but he said visitors to the airport have to apply common sense when deciding whether to bring such a weapon along.

Police said a woman and her 17-year-old daughter reported fearing for their safety when Steinmetz removed his AR-15 from his shoulder with the muzzle facing towards them in a waiting area.

Just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean it's a smart thing to do. You know why that is? It's because we, the public, have no idea if the person carrying that AR-15 is a good guy or a bad guy, and we certainly don't know if this supposed "good guy" might suddenly decide he's going to take everybody out. I don't know about you, but my telepathy simply doesn't work most days.

Damn straight I would've felt threatened by this bozo and his AR-15 in a public terminal, and damn straight I would've called the police. I mean, fer fuck's sake. If you seriously think you need a gun slung over your shoulder to buy a cup of bad airport coffee....you've got issues.

(None of the stories I've read about this have indicated whether or not the gun was loaded. Although I would have bet money it was, because to people like this, there's no point in having a gun if you're not prepared to use it. No doubt Mr. Steinmetz would have shot a hole in his coffee cup had it failed to please him.)

Of course, this imbecile is raised and matched by his "defender" in the story.

But Korwin said it is obvious that Steinmetz was making a valuable political statement, and a dramatic one at that.

"He didn't do anything illegal. I thought he did it to make a point,'' Korwin said.

What point, pray tell? That it's a wonderful thing to intimidate and frighten people for no reason? Did Mr. Steinmetz know, through his spot-on precognition, that some other "good guy with a gun" was going to be at the airport that day, and said "good guy" just had to see another wannabe Rambo with a bigger dick "Second Amendment Remedy" to make him think twice about whipping out his own?

In Alan Corwin's paranoid little brain, of course that impossible, unprovable scenario could have happened. This is why these asshats must keep their guns with them at all tines.

Great Flying Spaghetti Monster, what a terrible way to live.

Then the story ends with Alan Corwin kicking his mania into overdrive.

He said anyone who would criticize Steinmetz, or others who choose to arm themselves, should think about what would happen if terrorists struck at at Sky Harbor, or if criminals decided to commit a crime there.

"If the Jihad were to start at this airport, you would be very happy he was there," Korwin said.

The HELL. I. WOULD., you ignorant fuckwit. For one thing, I think the capitol of this state is Phoenix, not Riyadh or Islamabad. In that blessed state Mr. Corwin clearly never visits known as "reality," there are extremely long odds against a "Jihad" actually happening here. I guess there might be a slightly better chance of a "crime," whatever that's supposed to mean--let's say robbing Starbucks' cash register, since what the hell else is there to steal inside an airport terminal? The TSA body scanners? In which case you as the cashier simply give them the money and send them on their way, out to where airport security waits (since of course you have a secret alarm button you pressed as soon as the robbery started going down). You certainly don't invite an untrained, AR-15-wielding yahoo to stick his two bits (or two shots) worth in, since this would be a great way to start a massacre. Those flying patriotic bullets really don't care who they hit.

Finally, Mr. Corwin and Mr. Steinmetz, I do not expect, want or need your so-called "protection." I can run and hide as good as anybody, and I will do exactly that, in the extremely unlikely event of anything happening. As far as I'm concerned, I would much rather take my chances with the imaginary Jihadists than some insecure jackass who thinks his "blaze of glory" is just around the corner.

"Revenge proves its own executioner"

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”  ― Mahatma Gandhi


This is just stupid, unnecessary, petty revenge.

The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts wants to make one thing clear: they do not want the late Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev buried in their town.

[snip]


Funeral director Peter Stefan however told reporters he has not found a cemetery in the state willing to take the body.

"We have to bury this guy. Whatever it is, whoever he is, in this country we bury people," Stefan told local media on Sunday.

Protesters meanwhile have gathered outside the funeral home waving US flags and clutching signs demanding that the body be sent to Russia. A local activist has even started a fund to ship out the body.

Protests won't bring back the dead, or reattach limbs that were blown off. Fighting the uncle who had nothing to do with the bombing, and moreover immediately and unequivocally condemned his nephews for doing such a thing, only makes the protesters look like selfish assholes.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev already paid the ultimate price. Holding his body hostage accomplishes nothing. Let it go.

"The sheer hard-on of owning a gun"

“How many have to die before we will give up these dangerous toys?”  ~Stephen King, Guns

You must watch this incredible testimony from the father of one of the children killed in Sandy Hook. I wish he could have been at the Senate hearings to throw this in Wayne LaPierre's face.

“I do not think the composition of that foundational phrase [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness] was an accident,” he said. “I do not think the order of those important words was haphazard or casual. The liberty of any person to own a military-style assault weapon and a high-capacity magazine and keep them in their home is second to the right of my son to his life.”

Of course, this is not the position of the NRA, where the Second Amendment outweighs everything else, even the Constitution itself.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Bottom line: My life is more important than your gun. Period.

"Satire is focused bitterness"

“A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.”  ― G.K. Chesterton


This is from the Onion--but I don't doubt this is exactly what is going through Wayne LaPierre's head.


National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre said Monday that somewhere around 1,000 kids would have to die in a school shooting in order for the organization to reconsider their longstanding opposition to gun control.

"Yeah, that's probably the only way we'd reassess much of anything at this point: 1,000 dead kids, shot up pretty good, lying face down in the school auditorium or something like that," LaPierre said, noting that anything less than 1,000 dead kids would not be enough for the NRA to stop urging Congress to pass pro-gun legislation. "I mean, that's just a ballpark number, but I imagine seeing 1,000 or so body bags being wheeled out of a school and a whole town of crying parents would probably make us reflect on our values for at least a little bit."

"So yeah, more or less 1,000 dead kids," LaPierre added. "Something around there. And teachers don't count."

What a disgusting man. What a horrid organization.

Well, Duh

This comment from Balloon Juice just nails it.

One other thing, I’ve noticed with many of these mass shootings a certain victim-blaming going on. “If they had had guns…” “If they had had the will to act…” It’s sickening.

Yes, it is. Because goodness knows, we can't pass common-sense regulation to restrict high-capacity magazines, ban assault weapons, require background checks on all purchases, or in any other way take guns away from the shooter.

"The World's More Full of Weeping"

I stole this from the irreplacable Charlie Pierce. He didn't have the title of the poem, but it's "The Stolen Child," by William Butler Yeats. (But I don't want to go to Faerie; I want to see a world where guns are properly controlled and this sort of madness is stamped out.)

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,.
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

I weep with those parents and loved ones tonight.

"He Who Fights With Monsters"

"Gun control? We need bullet control! I think every bullet should cost 5,000 dollars. Because if a bullet cost five thousand dollars, we wouldn't have any innocent bystanders."  ~ Chris Rock

The Absolute Last Word on the Colorado Shooting, by Jim Wright.

This is the cost of civilization, right? Twelve more dead kids in a movie theater. That’s freedom, right there. That’s liberty. That’s America goddamn it. That’s what I spent my whole life in uniform defending, the right to have twelve more slaughtered innocents and blood running in the streets. 

You just can’t stop it.  Crazy people with guns and random carnage are the price you pay so that the rest of us can be free.

Seriously? That’s your solution? 

Armor up and shoot it out?

Read. The. Whole. Thing.

"Any of you boys want to shoot, now's the time"

Science fiction writer Adam-Troy Castro writes a chilling tale of exactly what would have happened if some wannabe-Rambo had whipped out his substitute dick in that crowded Aurora theater and tried to take the shooter out.

Shorter version: a lot more people would have died.

Because the theatre is dark and Holmes is wearing black and the air is full of smoke and not everybody knows where the original shots came from, the firing continues anyway. There are now people shooting from six locations in the auditorium, indeed the four corners of the auditorium, a pattern that no organized military commander would ever sanction and which has the effect of the famed circular firing squad. In the next ten seconds or so, three of the gun wielders fire wildly, two others to greater effect, one more shouting at the others to hold their fire dammit, because the bad guy is down. Another half dozen innocents go down, two fatally. The sitrep in the theatre is now full-on panic, people climbing over another in their passion to escape, some of them going down because they happen to flee toward a disoriented shooter who interprets their advance as assault. More woundings. More deaths.


Holmes gets up, sees what’s happening, and grins like the loon he is, because his plan has succeeded greater than his wildest imagination. He styles himself The Joker and is pleased to see that his vicious prank has had an effect the comic-book and movie Joker would have proved. He empties a clip into the head of a child and, what the hell, let us not imbue all of our alternate-world shooters with too much incompetence, goes down with a bullet through the neck, dead. This is not NECESSARILY what would happen, of course -- remember, he is armored, and he is wearing a gas mask, and is the only person in the auditorium not disoriented, and chances are that he will continue to fire at an audience already busily engaged in slaughtering itself, but we cannot continue this fantasy with the premise that return fire continues to miss him, because all the people who wish the theatre goers were armed will otherwise erupt with rage at what they perceive as me stacking the deck. So, okay: a brilliant shot, from a guy in the back who sees his opportunity and takes it, and who puts the bad guy down with a one-of-a-kind genius act of marksmanship, that ends his threat forever. I will give you that much, because it’s the fantasy you want.


(snip)


The shooting goes on for another full minute after James Holmes is dead. He only got about half the people he got in our own tragic version of events. However, his mission has been completed by others, in the meantime, who not only matched his total in our universe, but exceeded it. Twenty dead, another eighty wounded, more than half of them by friendly fire. 

Gee. That improved things.

Because of this idiotic fantasy, we can't have meaningful gun control in this country.

Asshat of the Day

Arizona voters recalled Russell Pearce specifically because of the "papers please" law, not because of his general wingnut stupidity. So at least he's gone, for now. Unfortunately, he's still stupid.

Russell Pearce Blames Aurora Victims for Massacre

It's a good thing Salil Kapur grabbed a screencap, because the post has now vanished.

What a heart breaking story. Had someone been prepared and armed they could have stopped this "bad" man from most of this tragedy. He was two and three feet away from folks, I understand he had to stop and reload. Where were the men of flight 93???? Someone should have stopped this man. Someone could have stopped this man. Lives were lost because of a bad man, not because he had a weapon, but because noone was prepared to stop it. Had they been prepared to save their lives or lives of others, lives would have been saved. All that was needed is one Courages/Brave man prepared mentally or otherwise to stop this it could have been done. 

This is so disgusting, and makes me so angry, I can hardly gather my thoughts to respond.

First of all: This was a midnight showing, on a weekday night, of a very popular movie. To attend said screening armed to the teeth,  just in case a domestic terrorist walked in and started shooting, requires a level of paranoia that simply does not exist among the general populace. Nor should it.

Secondly: The people of flight 93 (not just men, mind you) had quite some time to think about, talk out, and plan what they were going to do. They had been in touch with their relatives via cell phone; they knew the towers had gone down, and they were on a flight from which there would be no return, either way. This is orders of magnitude different from someone storming a theater and mowing down 71 people in a matter of minutes, in the dark, with tear gas and people stampeding and screaming and slipping on a floor slick with blood. "Someone should have stopped this man," my gold-plated ass. It's vile to even make the comparison.

Thirdly: As has been pointed out by people far more knowledgeable about guns than myself, it would have been impossible to make such a shot anyway, even if the gunman had not been body-armored to the gills. The shooter had all the advantages, and there was nothing anyone could have done. It's as simple as that.

(Of course, what Russell Pearce is really saying here is that if he had been in that theater, by God and the Stars and Stripes, he and his extra-long John Wayne dick would have taken that mofo out. Even if he managed to kill ten more people along the way.)

After this, in a follow-up post, Pearce complains about being "mischaracterized." Sure. He then deletes both posts, so you can't be mean to him any more, wah wah wah.

To borrow a line from President Obama's great ad, Russell Pearce isn't the solution. He's the problem.

Two Comments on the Colorado Shooting

From John Cole at Balloon Juice:

It occurred to me tonight that we live in a country where the Supreme Court has decided the 1st amendment does not give you the right to yell “fire” in a crowded movie theatre, but the 2nd Amendment gives you an unfettered right to amass enough guns to shoot 71 people in the same theatre.

No wonder Europeans think Americans are fucking stupid.

Amen, brother.

My two cents: If I had a time machine, I would visit the Founding Fathers and ask them, nay, beseech, implore and beg them, not to write the 2nd Amendment into the Constitution.

It's more trouble than it's worth.