As another year comes to a close, there’s no shortage of fuel, oxygen, heat and irony
Two weeks ago we were safe from guns and mothers with guns and sons. Now we all have to have a meaningful discussion about one or the other of those things.
Previously, nobody noticed the country had an extremely high rate of violence. Now that we’ve noticed, we must fix whatever went wrong in this case. Just like we always fix the one little thing that goes wrong in every case. That’s why this is the utopia your grandparents left for you.
So, let’s see, what went wrong? Was it a homeless man who shot the kids? Then we could write more laws restricting those people.
Oh darn, he wasn’t homeless.
Did he kill them by exploding his underpants? We could search everybody at schools for exploding underpants, like we do on airplanes.
No exploding underpants.
He was kind of a minority, but not one of the ones we can rein in anymore, since Perry Como sang the Find-a -wheel-and-it-goes-round-round-round song. Any day now, one of them might be president, so skip that.
It comes down to this. One, he got his mother’s guns and ammo. Two, he was fidgety and didn’t have any friends (Asperger’s). Three, the school was run by people who didn’t have guns and ammo. So there you go. It’s that old recipe for fire: Fuel, oxygen, heat. It’s science.
We’ll lock up friendless people. Wait, that’s not fair. Not all friendless people murder. Only friendless people with guns murder. Without guns, friendless people only maim, as an example in China proved. Or Argentina. Who cares? Someplace, someone went nuts with a knife and nobody died.
So we don’t have to lock up friendless people. This is good because it’s all relative, and if they start locking up everyone less friendly than my Uncle Ned, three-fourths of Seattle will end up behind bars.
We just have to keep guns away from friendless people. So what we’ll do is round up everybody in the country, and test them to see if they’re friendly. There’s a test for that which can also tell if you know insects are crawling on you. (They are.) Then, the non-friendly ones, being at risk for friendlessness can be targeted for rapid personal disarmament.
Next, after we get guns away from those people, we’ll turn around and give them to teachers, principals and school janitors. Problem solved. No more Newtowns.
We’ll return to the utopia we were enjoying, where over 17,000 Americans kill themselves with guns every year, and only 14,000 people die from being shot by someone else, almost never by a guy with Asperger’s syndrome. That will be all right, because cars kill more Americans than that. It’s nothing to get worked up about, it’s just the price you pay for progress.
We have to have our guns in order to have a well-regulated militia. Well, we don’t actually have a well-regulated militia. We have street gangs and white supremacists, but if we did want to have a well-regulated militia, we’d need our guns.
Why don’t we have a well-regulated militia, anyway? Oh, yeah, we have a volunteer army, made up of poor people who couldn’t get good jobs to get themselves where they wouldn’t get shot by street gangs dealing drugs or locked up in prison for doing drugs or starving and living on the streets and getting beat up. So long as we can keep those poor people in supply, we can get them to fight wars, and that’s all we meant to use a militia for anyway, wasn’t it? To preserve our utopia.
So, keep the drug war going. Keep letting rich congressman keep their kids out of the military. Keeping cranking out poverty by paying people rock-bottom wages. Only pay attention to the violence when the victims look like your own kids.
And your head goes spinning round, round, round / ‘cause you’ve found what you’ve been dreamin’ of.