The recent tornadoes and killing storms in oklahoma and kansas serve to remind us that it’s not just the psychotic teenagers with guns we need to be afraid of.
yes, mother nature can still kill us just as well as we can one another. after all, she’s got a lot more confirmed kills than we do. no number of gun-weilding teenage outcasts can compare to millions of years of history.
this is not to lessen the impact or the grief many of us feel about what happened at columbine high school last month, but it seems the blame and attention for the whole terrible mess has been misplaced. the media, for example, televised the memorial services (something i’ve only seen before when royalty got killed by drunken chauffers), all of which should have been personal, private moments for the families and friends of the dead. i’m not a big fan of funerals myself, as i’ve been to a few, so i get a sickened, disgusted, maggots in the meat kind of feeling even passing by one on television while scanning for something less morbid to watch.
and while i’m on the topic, exactly how many memorial services, ceremonies, gatherings, and media events do we need to have when something like this happens? i anticipate this sort of thing happening again many times in the future, seeing as we’re all a bunch of sick, depraved, trigger-happy freaks that can’t stand to see someone on television screwing up a perfectly good school shooting that we have to go out and show them how it’s done – is the latest memorial spree to be seen as a precedent? there’s been about one ceremony a day since the shootings – most of them put on for the benefit of the media, not the victims or their families. is that a precedent we want to set for the next time? i need to know, so i can plan not to watch television or listen to the radio for three weeks – or until the next natural disaster comes along.
funny how a mile wide tornado tearing through a few hundred homes and businesses, leaving nothing standing taller than a cocker spaniel, tends to put a couple of high school misfits with guns in perspective.
and the whole point of my ranting today was to talk about guns. sorry, it took longer than usual to get to the point.
people have speculated that, if guns weren’t so available, so freely acessible to buy, own, and carry, that this particular tragedy would never have happened. bullshit. my stance has always been that, yes, there are too many guns. and yes, there are too many ways for kids to get them, most often from unscrupulous adults who either don’t care what happens, or feel like it’s worth the money to look the other way.
and i count the national rifle association right up there with the klan as satan’s favorite bunch of guys.
but i must say that, if there were no guns, we’d still find a way to kill one another. i’m sure we’d blow each other to bits with bombs, or run one another down in the street with cars, or just poke each other to death with pointed sticks.
my point is this – while guns and the people who make them, distribute them, or vote down the laws to regulate them should all be set on fire, chopped into little pieces, and then pissed on – it’s not their fault that two boys took out their awkwardness on their schoolmates. no amount of press posturing by anti-gun lobbyists on daytime talk shows will change human nature. awkward, outcast, marginalized adolescents will sometimes go over the edge, and when they do, they will kill.
if these two particular nazi wannabes hadn’t been able to get hold of guns, they would have gone straight to the homemade bombs, and there wouldn’t be banners and flowers at columbine, there would be craters. big ones – did you see the plans they got from the internet?
and if there were no bomb-making materials available, they would have waited outside in the truck until people started pouring out into the parking lot.
the killing instinct and bloodlust people feel after they go over the edge that most of us never approach is unabatable. there is no denying it, to the point that, if there’s no weapon available, people will tear one another apart with their bare hands. nature made us that way, for the same reason she made tornadoes and hurricanes and wild things with sharp claws and too many teeth.