It's The Ideology

It wasn’t a gun.  It wasn’t a bomb. It wasn’t a machete.   It was a truck.  2 -3 minutes.  84 now dead, including 10 children. Do you understand now? It’s not the weapon.  It’s the ideology. ~  A viral Facebook post.

I’ve had an epiphany. Yes, I totally understand now.  If someone with a twisted ideology or some random radical Islamist wants to take out a crowd of people then he’ll find a way.  It might be fertilizer rife with ammonium nitrate, it might be a box cutter, it might be a baseball bat (as happened in Deltona Florida in 2004) or it might be a simple kitchen knife as happened in Osaka in 2001.  Most recently of course, it was a truck.  "Where there's a will, there's a way," goes the old saw.

Yes the words of that viral post got me to thinking and then I recalled some past dark and disturbing thoughts of my own. My boss had thoroughly pissed me off.  I was beside myself with anger.  She had given me a dressing down in front of my peers; humiliated me.  A day or so later I was returning from lunch with a leftover sub sandwich in my hand. I walked past her car and there she was taking her noontime nap, mouth open, drool oozing from her mouth.  Still seething, I stopped and plotted. I could take this sandwich, I thought, jam it in her mouth and down her throat and hold it there until she expired.  Death by hoagie. I could see the ensuing headline; Sammicide: Disgruntled Employee Kills Boss With Tuna Sandwich   The sandwich lobby would naturally be in a panic. Every Subway would display the slogan, When sandwiches are outlawed, only outlaws will have sandwiches. 

All of the preceding is of course patent crap.  But it’s not as ridiculous as that post that went viral. And not nearly as insulting.  That pile of road apples (horse shit for those not of my generation) is the same nonsense that the gun lobby has been dumping on the public for decades.  I remember it when I was a kid and mass shootings were more or less a rarity.  Mass shootings, hell – shootings in general, have now become so commonplace that we would accept a day without gun violence as a welcome respite from the norm.  

It’s not the weapon.  It’s the ideology.

            Newton Leroy Gingrich took this road following the incident in Nice where a man drove down a crowded promenade.  “I fully expect by tomorrow morning that President Obama will have rediscovered his left-wing roots and will give a press conference in which he will explain the problem is too many trucks,” Gingrich said.

Garret Graves, GOP Representative from Louisiana tweeted, Wondering if the president is going to propose truck control now.

Breitbart contributor James Delingpole also took to Twitter, Ban trucks! We need truck control, like they have in Canada

Yes I said ridiculous and insulting.  Ridiculous because it is simply an asinine apples and oranges argument.  Let’s just leave it at this; vehicles were invented for transportation; pens were invented for writing; baseball bats were invented as an implement of the national pastime.  And guns were invented for; hmmm, let me think about that for a ... nanosecond.  Yeah they were invented for killing.  And that technology for killing has improved (for lack of a better term) exponentially since I was a kid and first heard this hooey (and even as a kid I recognized it for the baloney that it is).

The sad truth though is that in America someone with mass killing on his mind doesn’t need to waste his time with a truck or a box cutter.  In America killing with a gun is as convenient as buying a gallon of milk at the mom and pop store. In America we have a national organization (NRA) that is glad to promote a policy that makes an assault rifle with endless clips available to just about anyone who wants to have one.  And legislators who's balls are in the pocket of NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre are totally willing to back that policy. When getting an automatic weapon is easier than getting a driver's license why bother with something as unwieldy as a truck or as inefficient as a box cutter? 

This equivalence of guns to just about any object that comes to the feeble mind is insulting.  It insults the people who died in Nice; it insults the victims of Sandy Hook (and their families) and other tragedies and it insults anyone who wants to have a meaningful dialog.  In fact it insults this very serious and controversial subject that costs lives on a daily basis. 

Am I surprised that the Facebook post went viral?  Oh hell no. The gun nuts grab at this stuff as if it were Benjamins falling from the sky.  They’re the lemmings who will gladly follow Wayne LaPierre off the cliff, taking a nation and the butcher’s bill along with them.  And hey, looking for a twisted ideology?  Look no further than the National Rifle Association. 

The post of course ignores the fact that most of the mass killings in America are not due to any ideology (Translated - Islam). Adam Lanza didn't shoot up an elementary school after killing his mother over a religion. James Holmes didn't bring his arsenal into a theater for any political belief.  If they had any ideology it must have been told to them by the demonic voices that were rattling around in their heads. Doug Williams' apparent ideology was that he had issues with his job so he decided to kill 6 of his co-workers at Lockheed Martin.  None of them chose to use the cumbersome and messy method of a box cutter. 

This is the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” hokum that’s transmitted like a virus by folks who pretend that they hold dearly to the Constitution.  Unfortunately most of these folks cling to only one single amendment – the second; and the hell with the rest of it; particularly the first, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.  By and large these are the same sheep who baa in deference to one Donald J. Trump who, in a discussion of the Constitution proudly asserted, “I’m for Article I, I’m for Article II, I’m for Article XII.” Unfortunately there is no Article XII - or an VIII through XI for that matter. So these Constitutionally savvy folks are perfectly fine with a president who has no apparent clue when it comes to basic high school civics. It's all about a perverted interpretation of the Second Amendment. 

These are the same yahoos that think open carry is just mahvelous. "One good guy with a gun will stop a shooter," we're told. That worked really well in Dallas when one gunman was shooting at police who had their attention diverted from the shooter by the open carry crowd who thought it was a great idea to bring a gun to what had been a peaceful demonstration.  Apparently once the shooting started the "good guys" scattered like rats. Which was probably the only good that came from those cowboys. Open carry. 

It’s not the weapon.  It’s the ideology.  Reading that kind of fallacious rubbish absolutely infuriates me (as if you couldn’t tell – right?).  And it should infuriate anyone with any sort of cognitive thought process. But more than that it saddens me.  It’s depressing because when this sort of poppycock goes viral what it tells me is that there is probably no solution.  It tells me that this nation has been hijacked by a paranoid, testosterone fueled, gun crazed notion that a writing implement is as deadly as an AR-15. Now THAT is a perverted ideology and in this instance the deadly weapon IS the ideology.

Footnote: As this writing was being completed reports came out that officers in Baton Rouge were shot. 3 killed - 7 wounded.  Reports are that the shooter had an assault rifle. No confirmation as of this writing and all of the facts still have to be confirmed. It is another sad chapter in our gun crazed story. I pray for the officers and their families.