Folks are just dying to go to New Orleans

This young Australian woman, her face ripped up by a bullet from a handgun, was one of the lucky ones after yet another gunfight at the OK Corral, otherwise known as New Orleans' Bourbon Street.

A young woman from much closer -- Hammond, La. --  will be going home in a coffin. She died today. Here's the breaking news from the New Orleans Advocate:

A 21-year-old woman who had been in critical condition since being struck during Sunday night’s mass shooting on Bourbon Street has died, the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office said.

Brittany Thomas, 21, was pronounced dead at 2:44 p.m., said John Gagliano, the coroner’s chief investigator.

Thomas was among 10 people hit when two gunmen who remain at-large opened fire on each other about 2:45 a.m. Sunday at Bourbon and Orleans streets.

Only three victims remain hospitalized at Interim LSU Hospital. They were in stable condition Wednesday, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Police have not yet identified the gunmen but said they are looking for Justin Odom, 20, as a person of interest in the case. He has not been named a suspect.

UNSURPRISINGLY, local officials are in major freak-out mode. Even a Louisiana politician -- or police chief -- easily can envision the city's tourism-based economy dying in the street, riddled with slugs from a young thug's handgun. The publicity has been particularly great in Australia.

Not.

But don't worry, be gun happy. The Second Amendment will save us, if only we turn it into a Wyatt Earp free-for-all. Perhaps if more people on Bourbon had been packing . . . the death toll could be a lot higher.

The United States has gone mad -- gun mad . . . gun-violence mad -- and New Orleans is one of the biggest nut wagons in the loony bin. I'm used to telling friends traveling to New Orleans what parts of town they're least likely to get killed in, but after three major shootings on Bourbon Street in three years, the French Quarter might be dropped from the list.

And if you drop the French Quarter from the list . . . I understand New England is quite lovely this time of year.

Because The City That Care Forgot is, more accurately, The City That Forgot to Get Its S*** Together.

No, there's not really a man in it, either

This is an Arizona man's brain.

This is his brain on drugs.

And when this is your brain on drugs, you think "shoot the moon" is something more than just an expression.

Cameron Read, 39, was arrested on June 6 and admitted to smoking marijuana before trying to shoot the moon.

The man's girlfriend called 911 and said her boyfriend fired several shots from a handgun and was still armed at a home in the 4400 block of Preston.

Police said a 49-year-old woman and her 15-year-old son were in the home when Read reportedly fired a round out of the window, and they reported hearing several more shots as they fled the home. No one was hurt.

Prescott Valley police said they needed to use force to get Read into custody. He was booked into the Yavapai County Jail for two counts of disorderly conduct, two counts of endangerment, one count of resisting arrest, one count of criminal damage and one count of unlawful discharge of a firearm.

SOMETHING tells me that Cameron Read doesn't much. Particularly about science or physics. You know, books and articles that cover the concepts of propulsion, gravity and escape velocity.

It's just a hunch, but I'll bet I'm pretty spot on. Another hunch is that the killer weed he partook of might have claimed his last brain cell. Alas, he didn't have that many to spare.

Death's who's coming for breakfast

Five-year-old Payton Benson was eating breakfast Wednesday morning when a bullet with her name on it exploded through the wall of her north Omaha home and killed her dead.

The cussing ghetto toddler of Omaha viral-video fame fired the shot.

The gang bangers poisoning the young mind of the cussing Omaha toddler fired the shot.

The idiot teenage mother of the cussing Omaha toddler, who thinks "kids cuss" because, no doubt, that's as normal for a 2-year-old as breathing, fired the shot.

The deviant, criminally inclined and now-imprisoned mama of the idiot teenage mother of the cussing Omaha toddler fired the shot.

The no-count baby daddies so quick on the draw and even quicker to split when a hot mama turns into a baby mama fired the shot. Ditto for those young women so frustratingly committed to looking for love in all the wrong places.

The perpetually aggrieved talking heads who condemned the Omaha police union for highlighting the obvious -- whatever its motive at the time -- because to tell an inconvenient truth is somehow self-evidently racist . . . they pulled the trigger, too.

The law-and-order politicians content to "solve" the crime problem by cramming the state's prisons to bursting with the thug children of an underclass anticulture -- and doing it while ignoring grinding poverty, invincible hopelessness and that underclass anticulture thing. . . . 

Pulled the trigger.

No doubt they'll demand the death penalty for everybody except themselves. Because crime.

Because "justice."

ACTUALLY, little Payton Benson died because a bunch of American Frankenstein's monsters a block over -- no doubt once just like the cussing Omaha toddler, poisoned by the same culture of death that hates life and knows no hope -- were shooting it out in the middle of the street. Witnesses mentioned a handgun and a high-powered rifle.

A slug from one of those guns missed whomever its intended target was, flew down the block and down the block and down the block some more but still had enough juice to penetrate the walls of 3328 N. 45th St., and then the little body of a little girl who never saw death coming. Says the Omaha World-Herald:

The mother, Tabatha Manning, ran out screaming, a relative said.

Payton was Omaha's first homicide of the new year.

“Bullets know no boundaries, they know no target, they are going to land where they land,” [Police Chief Todd] Schmaderer said during a press conference Wednesday evening.

“Enough of the gang violence, and enough with the random shootings.”

Schmaderer and [Omaha Mayor Jean] Stothert promised to find the person who killed an innocent girl. Both leaders expressed their sympathy for Payton's family members.

“I promise this family and I promise this community that my homicide investigators, my gang investigators, will work around the clock, leaving no stone unturned to solve this homicide,” Schmaderer said.

Shell casings indicated that gunfire broke out at the intersection of 44th Avenue and Emmet Street, a block from Payton's house. Multiple people exchanged gunfire, Schmaderer said.

Police were looking for three black men who fled in a black Jeep Commander. Initial 911 reports described one as having a handgun, one armed with a high-powered rifle and the third wearing a bandanna.

Police found a Jeep matching that description at St. James Manor Apartments, 3102 N. 60th St., but they had not determined whether the vehicle was involved.

(snip)

The chief said he had a message for the assailants: “You know who you are, and law enforcement will find out who you are. It may not have been your bullet that struck this little girl. So do the right thing and do yourself a favor in the process. Come down and talk to law enforcement and tell us what you know.”

Massey Allen III, 33, who identified himself as a relative of Payton, said he was stopped at 45th Street and Bedford Avenue when he heard gunfire and ducked under his steering wheel.

Allen estimated that about 20 shots were fired. Several neighbors called 911, and officers patrolling the neighborhood heard the gunshots and responded, Schmaderer said. Payton was pronounced dead at Creighton University Medical Center.

Allen said Manning, 31, had recently moved to Omaha from Chicago. She wanted to earn a nursing degree, he said.

SEE WHAT trying to better yourself gets you in the 'hood? Your kid killed at the breakfast table by the unintended consequence of unintended consequences. That's the underclass anticulture for you. How very racist of me to mention that, despite it not being just a black thing.

Today, the police chief is outraged, the mayor is outraged and the whole city is outraged. We've been outraged before; we'll be outraged again. We Omahans -- we Americans -- are goddamned good at outrage, but not so much at actually doing something about that which outrages us again and again and again and again and again.

We're working on it, though. Results are preliminary, but we're pretty sure the solution has something to do with giving teachers concealed weapons, blaming big government (or institutionalized racism . . . one or the other), lowering taxes (or raising taxes on the rich), moving farther out in the suburbs, moving to a dee-luxe apartment in the downtown sky, cutting food stamps because . . . well, look at Those People . . . and going shopping.

The shopping part, we've got nailed.

Not The Onion

Iowa is a nice enough place, but Iowans are just, well . . . different.

After reading this story from USA TODAY, I eagerly await news of the Hawkeye State's first visually impaired, gay shotgun wedding.

Here's some news that has law enforcement officials and lawmakers scratching their heads:

Iowa is granting permits to acquire or carry guns in public to people who are legally or completely blind.

No one questions the legality of the permits. State law does not allow sheriffs to deny an Iowan the right to carry a weapon based on physical ability.

The quandary centers squarely on public safety. Advocates for the disabled and Iowa law enforcement officers disagree over whether it's a good idea for visually disabled Iowans to have weapons.

On one side: People such as Cedar County Sheriff Warren Wethington, who demonstrated for The Des Moines Register how blind people can be taught to shoot guns. And Jane Hudson, executive director of Disability Rights Iowa, who says blocking visually impaired people from the right to obtain weapon permits would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. That federal law generally prohibits different treatment based on disabilities

On the other side: People such as Dubuque County Sheriff Don Vrotsos, who said he wouldn't issue a permit to someone who is blind. And Patrick Clancy, superintendent of the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School, who says guns may be a rare exception to his philosophy that blind people can participate fully in life.

Private gun ownership — even hunting — by visually impaired Iowans is nothing new. But the practice of visually impaired residents legally carrying firearms in public became widely possible thanks to gun permit changes that took effect in Iowa in 2011.

"It seems a little strange, but the way the law reads we can't deny them (a permit) just based on that one thing," said Sgt. Jana Abens, a spokeswoman for the Polk County Sheriff's Department, referring to a visual disability.

Polk County officials say they've issued weapons permits to at least three people who can't legally drive and were unable to read the application forms or had difficulty doing so because of visual impairments.

And sheriffs in three other counties — Jasper, Kossuth and Delaware — say they have granted permits to residents who they believe have severe visual impairments.

"I'm not an expert in vision," Delaware County Sheriff John LeClere said. "At what point do vision problems have a detrimental effect to fire a firearm? If you see nothing but a blurry mass in front of you, then I would say you probably shouldn't be shooting something."

IN A RELATED development, the Iowa Legislature has just sent a bill to the governor that would require violent criminals to continuously beep during assaults and robberies.

Well, not exactly. That was a joke . . . today.

Tomorrow, who knows?

America in the looking glass

What's the difference between your average Islamic-extremist jihadi and your average American teenager with a gun?

The jihadi, at least, has a reason for killing. I'm not saying a good reason, but at least he has one. For three homegrown poster children for the culture of death, according to Oklahoma cops, not so much.

Because of that, an Australian baseball player out for a Friday jog in Duncan, Okla., is making an unexpected trip back home. In a coffin. Solely because he decided to go for a jog in his American girlfriend's hometown.

And solely because, by chance, three teenagers -- it is alleged --  decided that day was a good day for somebody to die, then happened to spy Chris Lane, catcher for East Central University in Ada, Okla.

It comes after a 16-year-old boy confessed to pulling the trigger and killing Lane, according to police chief Danny Ford.

Chief Ford said the 16-year-old was with two other teens aged 15 and 17 when they killed Lane during a random drive-by shooting in the town of Duncan.

He said the three teenagers had no motive other than to make a name for themselves.

All three are facing the charge of first-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of the death penalty.

Chief Ford told 3AW this morning one of the accused has confessed to pulling the trigger, saying he just wanted to kill someone.

"Lately there has been some pretty weak motives, but I don’t know that I’ve had one that they told us they were just going to kill somebody," he said.

He said the three teens were on a "killing spree" after , leaving a chilling message on Facebook.

Peter Lane said his son had left his mark and his death was just so pointless. 

(snip)

Chief Ford said the teens drove to another house to murder a second unrelated victim just hours after shooting Lane in the back and leaving him to die in an upper-class area of Duncan at 2.57pm local time Friday (5.57am Saturday Melbourne time).

"They wanted to be Billy Bob Badasses," Chief Ford said.

"I think they were on a killing spree.

"We would have had more bodies that night if we didn't get them."

On one of the alleged killer's Facebook pages investigators said they found the message: "Bang. Two drops in two hours".

The accused are in custody in Stephens County Jail, awaiting formal murder charges expected on Monday local time.

Earlier, Chief Ford said one of the teens had been co-operating.

"He said, ‘Yeah, we did it but I’m not going to tell you who pulled the trigger’," he said.

One of the alleged murderers was Caucasian, the other two were black, Chief Ford said.

Lane, 22, grew up in Oak Park in Melbourne’s north and was in the US on a sports scholarship.

He was jogging through an area of "high dollar homes" after leaving the home of his American girlfriend, Sarah Harper, when he was followed and shot at the intersection of Country Club Rd and Twilight Beach Rd.

AMERICA'S gun nuts think we could prevent a lot of this kind of thing if only everybody -- or at least enough people --were armed.

What I want them to explain to me, though, is how you defend yourself against being shot in the back, out of the blue. Because that's how we roll in the red, white and blue, every-man-is-an-island incarnation of the culture of death.

In the ghetto

The account of Baton Rouge's latest murder was brief and routine -- as brief as the lives of too many young black men and as routine as fatal shootings have become in my hometown.

It went like this in the Sunday paper:

Baton Rouge police found the body of a male late Saturday after responding to a call of shots fired on Geronimo Street, a news release says.

Officers received the call about 11:45 p.m. Saturday that shots were being fired on Geronimo Street, near Mohican Street, Capt. Dwayne Bovia said in the news release.

They found the body of a black male in a grassy area in the 3800 block of Geronimo Street, the release says.

Police did not provide the name or any other information about the victim.

JUST ANOTHER nothing story about the mundane destruction of human life and entire worlds. Entire worlds? Yes, entire worlds.

Naturally, you have the destroyed world of yet another destroyed inner-city neighborhood, and you have the destroyed world of deviance and death that its inhabitants must somehow navigate against all odds.

Then, you have the destroyed civic world of a city where murder is so routine as to barely be noticed by the daily newspaper. If it's true, as the Talmud says, that "Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world," what's to be said about a place as deadly as Baton Rouge?

What's to be said about the destruction of the world of every Baton Rougean who beholds this mundane obliteration of worlds and thinks "Meh." Or that it's just another day in the 'hood, what are you going to do?

How can we think of apathy, think of acceptance in the face of everyday death and creeping urban moonscapes as anything but the view from a destroyed world?

Me, I saw this little item and once again was reminded of the destruction of part of my world -- or at least its passing away decades ago. On Geronimo Street.

The constitutional right to bear nukes?

There seems to be a revolutionary fringe in this country -- one most recently animated by President Obama's modest proposals on gun control -- that is so far beyond being capable of engaging with reason in a reasonable manner that these folks probably couldn't even engage with Uncle Earl, Louisiana's late Gov. Earl K. Long.

Still, futile as it might ultimately prove with folks who have effectively careened into being anarchists, you've got to try.

Gun nuts and nullificationists and armchair revolutionaries, this is for you, taken from the biography of the arch-segregationist, anti-federal government Plaquemines Parish president, Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta:

But, because conservative principles were more important to him than party loyalty, he opposed every Democratic presidential nominee from Harry Truman in 1948 to Hubert Humphrey in 1968. The Judge was further frustrated by finding the Republican party too liberal for his taste, although he reluctantly supported Eisenhower for president in 1952 and 1956 and somewhat more enthusiastically backed Barry Goldwater in 1964. His political dogma was simple, unchanging and almost entirely negative: he opposed racial equality, federal ownership of tidelands oil resources, national welfare and public works programs, socialism in any form, and the mere existence of labor unions. Because the United States government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, to some extent endorsed all of these, Leander became an indomitable foe of federal power in any form. Although he concentrated authority entirely in his own hands in Plaquemines, he denounced every vestige of centralized power in the national government. His antipathy toward Washington became so notorious that Earl Long once asked, "Whatcha gonna do now, Leander? The feds have got the atom bomb."

The prophet was a soldier

‎"Men are blind and crazy, they think all the people of Ohio are trying to steal their slaves and incite them to rise up and kill their masters; I know this is a delusion—but when people believe a delusion they believe it harder than a real fact and these people in the South are going, for this delusion, to break up the government under which we live."

-- William Tecumseh Sherman, 1860

You knew William Tecumseh Sherman was a great Union general. You know what he did when he marched through Georgia, and you might even know that in the process, he invented modern "total" warfare.

But did you know that the general was also a prophet? That months before Louisiana's P.G.T. Beauregard set his Confederate batteries upon federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Sherman told his wife in Ohio and a secessionist Louisiana friend that there would be a war, why there would be a war, what would start the war and where it would start. Everything came to pass just as he said it would.

In December 1860, the founding superintendent of the fledgling Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, known today as Louisiana State University, sat down to pen a note to his little daughter Minnie back home in Lancaster. It begins with a papa telling his little one about their new house in Louisiana. It ends as a very grown-up lecture on the cold, hard facts of life.

Sherman writes another note to Mrs. Sherman, telling her his letter to Minnie drifted into something more appropriate for her, adding that she should just read what she saw fit to their little girl. Then, he added this:

There is an evident purpose, a dark design, not to allow time for thought and reflection. These southern leaders understand the character of their people and want action before the spirit subsides. Robert Anderson commands at Charleston, and there I look for the first actual collision. Old Fort Moultrie, every brick of which is as plain now in my memory as the sidewalk in Lancaster, will become historical. It is weak and I can scale any of its bastions. If secession, dissolution and Civil War do come South Carolina will drop far astern and the battle will be fought on the Mississippi. The Western States never should consent to a hostile people holding the mouth of the Mississippi.

But, oh, what he earlier wrote to Minnie!

Alexandria, La.,
Dec. 15, 1860

Dearest Minnie,

I have been intending to write you a good long letter, and now I wish I could send you all something for Christmas, but I thought all along that Mama and you and Lizzie, Willie, Tommy, and all would be here in our new house by New Year's day. The house is all done, only some little painting to be done. The stable is finished, but poor Clay has been sick. . . In the front yard are growing some small oak trees, to give shade in the hot summer days; now however it is raw and cold, the leaves are off and it looks like winter, though thus far we have had no snow. Maybe we will have some snow at Christmas. In the back yard I have prepared for a small garden, but the soil is poor and will not produce much, except early peas, lettuce and sweet potatoes. The house itself looks beautiful. Two front porches and one back, all the windows open to the floor, like doors, so that you can walk out on the porch either upstairs or downstairs. I know you would all like the house so much - but dear little Minnie, man proposes and God disposes - what I have been planning so long and patiently, and thought that we were all on the point of realizing, the dream and hope of my life, that we could all be together once more in a home of our own, with peace and quiet and plenty around us. All, I fear, is about to vanish, and again I fear I must be a wanderer, leaving you all to grow up at Lancaster without your Papa.

Men are blind and crazy, they think all the people of Ohio are trying to steal their slaves, and incite them to rise up and kill their masters. I know this is a delusion - but when people believe a delusion, they believe it harder than a real fact, and these people in the South are going, for this delusion, to break up the government under which we live. You cannot understand this but Mama will explain it to you. Our governor here has gone so far that he cannot change, and in a month maybe you will be living under one government and I another.

This cannot last long, and as I know it is best for you all to stay in Lancaster, I will not bring you down here at all, unless some very great change takes place. If this were only a plain college I could stay with propriety, but it is an arsenal with guns and powder and balls, and were I to stay here I might have to fight for Louisiana and against Ohio. That would hardly do; you would not like that I know, and yet I have been asked to do it. But I hope still this will yet pass away, and that our house and garden will yet see us all united here in Louisiana.

Your loving papa,

W. T. SHERMAN.

"WAR IS hell." Sherman told that to graduates of the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, recounting "cities and homes in ashes" and "thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies." Though he certainly knew it from his Louisiana days, maybe it was unnecessary then to belabor the point that war also destroys the fondest dreams of even its eventual winners -- really, more like its lesser losers.

That's a lesson we never learn, and everybody's always spoiling for a fight. Especially in the South. Especially now -- it's all over Facebook . . . if you dare go on Facebook anymore amid the latest existential conflict (gun control in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre) swirling about President Obama like leaves caught in an autumn whirlwind.

"Men are blind and crazy . . . when people believe a delusion, they believe it harder than a real fact." In other words, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." 

IT'S PROBABLY no historical accident that so much of This Present Nuttery has its genesis below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Having lived for a quarter century some 1,100 miles and a world away from the peculiar stew in which I was reared, I think I've gained a little perspective on my home state, Louisiana, and what we of a certain age were indoctrinated into as sons and daughters of the South. I have found that that perspective goes something like this: "Holy sh*t!"

In this angry day, during this troubled age, you could be forgiven for thinking nuttery has become the norm in America, and the vortex of the granola cyclone -- a perfect storm of nuts and flakes -- is moving slowly up the lower Mississippi River basin.

So, for all the secessionist, nullificationist, insurrectionist folks back home whose outrage has assaulted me at every cyber corner, I have just one more quote from LSU's founding father, W.T. Sherman. The then-superintendent of a little military academy delivered it, weeping, to his friend, Professor David F. Boyd:

You, you the people of the South, believe there can be such a thing as peaceable secession. You don't know what you are doing. I know there can be no such thing. . . . If you will have it, the North must fight you for its own preservation. Yes, South Carolina has by this act [its secession --R21] precipitated war. . . . This country will be drenched in blood. God only knows how it will end. Perhaps the liberties of the entire country, of every section and every man will be destroyed, and yet you know that within the Union no man's liberty or property in all the South is endangered. . . .

Oh, it is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization. . . .

You people speak so lightly of war. You don't know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing. I know you are a brave, fighting people, but for every day of actual fighting, there are months of marching, exposure and suffering. More men die in war of sickness than are killed in battle.At best war is a frightful loss of life and property, and worse still is the demoralization of the people. . . .

You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people and will fight, too, and they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it. . . .

The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth -- right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.

"WITH A bad cause to start with." You could almost forget we're talking about an anguished warning on Dec. 24, 1860, and think the future general was trying to talk some sense into today's laptop revolutionaries, heat-toting gun nuts, and the seceders, nullifiers, Obama-impeachers and insurrection-seekers who love them.

In a lot of ways, America today is as much a powder keg as it was in 1860. And just like 1860, there is no shortage of people, with hotheaded Southerners in the forefront, pitching lit matches in the arsenal door.

Eventually, someone will light the right match in the wrong spot, and something's gonna blow. And there will be blood.

Because some people never learn.

For the love of God. . . .

If you needed confirmation beyond what we've witnessed the past four years, here it is: The American right has lost its freakin' mind.

Such as it was. 

This comes from some Facebook page called "Government Sucks," and I've traced it back as far as Nov. 14 on followingjohngalt.org . . . which tells you about all you need to know about that particular whackadoodle website. Government may or may not suck, but what really sucks are people so far gone that they think the roundups and exterminations are about to begin -- and that we need assault weapons to stop it.

Apparently, disturbed people acquiring military-grade home arsenals and slaughtering innocents in movie theaters or first-grade classrooms are just regrettable collateral damage in the quest of "right-thinking Americans" to protect themselves from Pol Pot Josef Stalin Adolf Hitler Barack Obama.

I DON'T KNOW what you can say to people who believe this . . . or who will post this sort of offensive nuttery on sites like Facebook, which used to be a nice place to hang out online with your pals. And this is offensive. If I were Jewish, I would be beyond apoplectic.

Hell, as a Catholic, I am bordering on being the other side of apoplectic.

The thing is, you can't pull these folks back from the edge. Hardline "conservatives" are hellbent on getting further and further out there, and they cannot be reasoned with. "Get a hold of yourself, man!" will have no effect, and indeed will brand the exhorter as one of "you people." As an appeaser. As less than patriotic. As a "socialist."

As an enemy.

No, you can't argue with crazy. This sh*t is crazy. And presumably, the people who have given themselves over to the paranoid spirit of crazy are heavily armed -- or want to be. This will not end well.


UPDATE: Speaking of crazy, this from Politico:

Freshman Republican Rep. Steve Stockman (Texas) on Monday said he would "seek to thwart" executive action by President Obama in regard to gun laws by any means necessary, even if it means "filing articles of impeachment."

"The White House’s recent announcement they will use executive orders and executive actions to infringe on our constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms is an unconstitutional and unconscionable attack on the very founding principles of this republic," Stockman said in a statement. "I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment."

At a press conference in the East Room on Monday, Obama said he would consider executive actions on gun control, but said such actions would be limited in scope.

LORD, have mercy. Not that we have even a scintilla coming.

Bang, bang, shoot, shoot

This is crazy.

Gun Appreciation Day?

Designed to "send a message" to Washington?

By going to your local gun store and firing range?

The day before President Obama is sworn in for his second term of office and two days before the public Inauguration Day ceremonies?

SAYS the NPR blog item on The Two-Way:

Saying they're following the example of last year's Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, a coalition of "gun rights" activists announced today that they're calling on like-minded Americans to visit gun stores, gun ranges and gun shows on Jan. 19 in a show of unity they're calling "Gun Appreciation Day."

It's no coincidence that the 19th is Saturday of the weekend when President Obama will be sworn into office for a second time. Organizers say the date was chosen "to send a message to Washington two days before Obama's second inauguration." They're worried about what they see as the "Obama administration's post-Sandy Hook assault on gun rights."

On Dec. 14, a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., before taking his own life.

Among the groups that are on board with Gun Appreciation Day: the Second Amendment Foundation and the Conservative Action Fund, a so-called SuperPAC.

PRAY TELL, what exactly is the message right-wing gun nuts want to send here? "Screw with us, Obama, and we'll kill you"?

"We don't like how the election turned out, so we're thinking about implementing Plan B, which rhymes with "P," and that stands for 'putsch'"?

That's certainly what it sounds like. That's certainly what the splenetic context of the four-year conservative freak-out, as well as the timing of the event, suggests.

What this stuff also suggests is that the United States has gone as mad as it's been since the darkest days of the late 1960s. The difference today is that we operate on depleted social and civic capital and thus have little room for error.

It wouldn't take much for a whole bunch to go seriously south in a big hurry. Paranoid, angry people and guns are a match made in hell.

In other words, this is crazy.

The difference between can't and won't

But we, as a nation, we are left with some hard questions. Someone once described the joy and anxiety of parenthood as the equivalent of having your heart outside of your body all the time, walking around. With their very first cry, this most precious, vital part of ourselves -- our child -- is suddenly exposed to the world, to possible mishap or malice. And every parent knows there is nothing we will not do to shield our children from harm. And yet, we also know that with that child’s very first step, and each step after that, they are separating from us; that we won’t -- that we can’t always be there for them. They’ll suffer sickness and setbacks and broken hearts and disappointments. And we learn that our most important job is to give them what they need to become self-reliant and capable and resilient, ready to face the world without fear.

And we know we can’t do this by ourselves. It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realize, no matter how much you love these kids, you can’t do it by yourself. That this job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation. And in that way, we come to realize that we bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.

This is our first task -- caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.

And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations? Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children -- all of them -- safe from harm? Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know that they are loved, and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?

I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.

Since I’ve been President, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by a mass shooting. The fourth time we’ve hugged survivors. The fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims. And in between, there have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children, in small towns and big cities all across America -- victims whose -- much of the time, their only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law -- no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society.

But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely, we can do better than this. If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora, and Oak Creek, and Newtown, and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that -- then surely we have an obligation to try. 

-- President Barack Obama,
speaking at a Sunday night
memorial in Newtown, Conn.

Emilie Parker and dad

I agree with the president's sentiments, that we cannot accept that we are the kind of society where the wanton mass murder of little schoolchildren and other innocents is just the price of admission to "the greatest country on earth."

In fact, I would argue that any country where atrocities become commonplace -- and this is territory upon which the United States has trodden for some time now -- is no great country at all, much less the greatest. "American exceptionalism" may be alive and well, but it may well be an entirely different story than the propaganda spread by its most ardent cheerleaders

But then you have states like Louisiana, already perched atop the nation's gun-violence and child-welfare s*** lists, yet striving for greater perfection in sucking hard. Just in the last month and change, the state's voters have amended the constitution to make effective regulation of firearms all but legally impossible, while the administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal balances the state budget on the backs of those lacking the decency to become well-off before losing their minds:

The reductions mark the fifth year of budget cuts in the middle of the fiscal year. The trimming started at the end of the governor’s first year in office, coinciding with a rare snowfall in Baton Rouge.

For the latest round of cuts, the governor was able to fill the gap without needing legislators’ approval. Nichols outlined a combination of spending cuts, found money and streamlining savings to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget.

Among the deepest cuts were at the state Department of Health and Hospitals and the state Department of Children and Family Services.

Doctors, hospitals, mentally ill patients, pregnant women and dying patients will be affected by the state’s financial problems.

State Sen. Sharon Broome, D-Baton Rouge, complained that the reductions affect departments that deal with the state’s most fragile residents. “I hope we can see these reductions with faces on them,” she told Nichols.

Nichols said the administration avoided across-the-board reductions that would have dealt heavier cuts to health care and higher education. Instead, she said, the governor made cuts and drew in dollars from a legal settlement, a prison closure and a self insurance fund.

Higher education received $22 million in reductions. Nichols said that is softened by tuition increases producing more money than expected.

Other reductions include:

• Contract reductions for health care providers who help the poor, the mentally ill and the drug-addicted. 

• A 1 percent cut in the rate that doctors and hospitals are paid by the state to care for the poor. 

• The elimination of dental benefits for pregnant women relying on the state for health care. 

• Possibly laying off 63 state government workers.

Additionally, the administration will use money in a maintenance fund to operate state parks. Domestic violence victims will move into hotels or seek shelter with their families, reducing the cost of residential care. Some children at risk for mental illness might not receive treatment.

Several legislators zeroed in on the hospice program cut.

State Sen. Dan Claitor, R-Baton Rouge, said the cut amounts to the state not assisting people on their death beds unless they are in a nursing home.

“That’s pretty rough,” Claitor said.

SO, I GUESS the answer to the president's question Sunday night would be that there's no question America can do better in preventing atrocities involving firearms, but that there's also no question that whole swaths of this country won't do better in that regard.

Not can't do better -- won't do better. There is a difference.

That difference is as big as the one between life and death.

The little children suffer

The gates of hell opened upon a small town in Connecticut this morning, and the devil showed his true face to the little children.

As usual, Beelzebub looked a lot like us. Or a wild-eyed, murderous version of us.

We are a people that like to brag about the better angels of our nature, the divine spark that Abraham Lincoln once futilely tried to summon for a nation that instead imagined it saw nobility in the abyss. We also are a people that says its children are its future.

And, indeed, our children can embody the best that we are. Symbolize the best to which we aspire -- or say we aspire -- and sometimes even achieve.

"But Jesus said to them: Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such."

Today, in this vail of tears we inhabit, Satan said "Let the little children suffer." And then one of his henchmen on earth, in a place called Newtown, Conn., walked into a school packing heat. He killed the principal. He killed school staff.

Most of all, he killed the children -- 20 of them. He gunned them down without hesitation and without mercy. Many were kindergartners.

THIS WAS the work of a madman who once was a little child. Who was the son of a mother -- a kindergarten teacher at the site of his devilish rampage -- who, no doubt, loved him very much. 

He killed her, too.

Fallen child of God that I am -- no angel am I . . . no way -- the first thing I wanted for the killer of 6-year-olds at Sandy Hook Elementary School was for vengeance to be wrought upon him. I envisioned a .45 caliber handgun, and some administrator of God's wrath shooting off one of his digits at a time, until none were left.

And then the Saturday Night Special of Justice would get down to business.

That will not happen . . . not because we Americans are such pillars of justice and devotees of human dignity, but instead because Adam Lanza, 20, turned one of his guns on himself in a school hallway. Our revenge fantasies will remain just that.

The apostle Paul once reminded us that "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." The Lord God has stepped up to the plate. He'll be taking the swings, not us. That's a good thing.

I AM old enough to remember when events like today's in small-town Connecticut were virtually unthinkable. We had little frame of contemporary reference. When it did happen, it was so extraordinary that a TV movie surely lay in the prime-time future, and we'd forever remember the name of the perpetrator.

You know, like Charles Whitman, the "tower shooter" in 1966 at the University of Texas. He only killed 13, unlike Whatshisname.

"Whatshisname" is what we call all the madmen since Columbine. Ever since we and the world we inhabit have gone progressively more mad with the passing of each bloody year.

I don't know about you, but I'm starting to agree with my old man, who famously said a couple of months before his death, "Dey ain't no hope!"

Dey ain't no hope, indeed.

On the other hand, I am smart enough not to rely on my own judgment in this matter. To help me face times like these -- particularly Christmastimes like these -- I turn instead to the wiser counsel of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Johnny Cash.



GOD bless us, every one.

Pistol envy as public policy

People in Louisiana always have been a little bit nuts.

Sometimes, that's a good thing. When you enter the realm of public policy and self-governance, usually not.

Chalk up this latest news of Louisiana Whack, as reported by The Associated Press, as a definite "not, no, nuh uh":

Former Gov. Mike Foster is featured in an NRA radio ad supporting a constitutional amendment on the Nov. 6 ballot that would set a tougher standard for restricting weapons use and remove a provision that spells out legislative authority to limit concealed handguns. 

Supporters of Amendment No. 2 say the change would guard against possible future Supreme Court rulings that might affect the Second Amendment. 

In the ad, paid for by the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association, Foster says he's voting for the amendment to "guarantee our rights to own a gun in Louisiana no matter what happens in Washington."

BEHOLD, the breakdown of civil society in Louisiana -- what there ever was of it -- continues apace. This kind of bat-sh*t crazy constitutional amendment is not the sign of a healthy society or culture.

It is the sign of people who believe that civil society is either a) not possible any longer, or b) undesirable. If you were to gauge what there is of the "Louisiana mind" today, you'd probably find that it's a little of both.

That the Legislature sent to voters a measure making it difficult for the state to regulate firearms at all and seemingly all-but-erasing authority for government to regulate the carrying of concealed weapons is a profound loss of faith in, if not the rule of law itself, the ability of the state to maintain order.

Or at least enough order that it wouldn't be considered normal to pack heat -- hidden heat, no less. No, ascendant is the idea of concealed firearms as so crucial to individual freedom and well-being that the state has precious little right to interfere or regulate. Welcome back to the Wild West. And good luck prosecuting gangbangers on gun charges before they actually pull the trigger and cap somebody's ass.

NEVERTHELESS, I bet it passes. Crazy does as crazy is, and if you look at the numbers and the newspapers, you realize that only a bunch of flat-out lunatics could create the monument to dysfunction and delusion that is the Gret Stet.

Louisiana never has been big on the rule of law. Now, however, it threatens to go "all in" on the rule of force. Yeah, that should work out well in America's largest insane asylum.