Oops, I did it Again!

The bullet that ripped through Jane’s young flesh came without warning and while she was absorbed in her daily routine. When the 800 mile per hour lead projectile entered her skin, interrupting circulation and alienating ligaments and arteries, blood discharged instantly from her mouth. Before she hit the floor, another bullet sliced a major organ in two. By then the die had been cast. There would be no more birthdays, no holidays, no wedding dances, no high school reunions, and most of all, no classes in Lamaze. In her final moments, she tried to speak, but the result was suffocating silence. When the gunman’s deadly spree ended, they found her body floating in blood and urine.

Jane’s mother attempted to claim her daughter’s body, but collapsed in the morgue before she could view what remained. Mom spent a week in the hospital, and missed the funeral. It’s just as well. The sight of that black hearse would have killed her.

If you assume Jane’s death was a result of the bloody campus rampage at Virginia Tech, which claimed the lives of 32 people and was – by all media accounts - the worst massacre in the history of the United States, it was not.

If you think she might have been killed at Columbine eight years earlier, think again.

How about that office building in San Francisco where a man gunned down eight and wounded six? No, wrong again.

How about:
Stockton California School (1989)?
University of Iowa (1991)?
Richland High School (1995)?
Frontier Junior High (1996)?
Jonesboro, Arkansas (1998)?
Southwood Middle School (2004)?
Platte Canyon HS (2006)?

No.

OK how about:

The Long Island Railroad shooting?
The Amish school in Pennsylvania late last year?
The upscale mall in Salt Lake City a few months back?

No. None of the above.

But at this point, does it really matter where she met her fate? Suffice to say we kill each other. And ironically, life goes on.

Thousands have been slaughtered by gunfire in our schools, our malls, our public places. Over a million have been killed by guns since the 1960s. I won’t even talk about the billions in medical costs. And nothing changes. Because the people who control the people who control We the People have it all figured out.

It works like this: After the carnage, the man in charge gives a speech to subdue the nervous public. At Virginia Tech it was President Bush who rushed to make an appearance lest he loses any “quality” media time (and who can blame him). As required he: Invoked the Lord, quoted scripture, and offered condolences.

When he was done, it was back to business as usual.

And anyone who dares to intervene, who tries to talk sensibly about guns and violence and protecting our children, and who is not in agreement with this system’s lock-step approach to handling any issue regarding our social well-being will be…well…shot down.

Talk about holding people hostage!

Apparently it wasn’t enough that we had already been thru decades of massacres in our own backyards when Bush allowed the (10-year old) Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) to expire just two months before the 2004 elections. The people who voted for him that year – and we’re not sure who they were (and probably neither are they) - possibly did not know that fact. At news of the AWB lapse, gun makers were reportedly “salivating”.

The following quote, published 9/14/04, is from a website that opposed the Ban:

“The AWB has made it illegal for a citizen to own or purchase magazines with capacities larger than 10 cartridges that have been manufactured or imported after the ban was made law.
The intent of having a smaller magazine capacity is that a criminal could not fire as many shots as rapidly, therefore reducing the ability to kill or wound more people. However, the statistical evidence showed:
‘The ban has failed to reduce the average number of victims per gun murder incident or multiple gunshot wound victims.”

The killer at Virginia Tech purchased one of his (increased-magazine-capacity) weapons on eBay – probably using his credit card. Now I ask: Can it get any easier?

I might point out that lifting the ban certainly failed to reduce the number of victims as well.

I wonder if our forefathers, when drafting the Second Amendment, had the vision to consider online auction warehouses as gun merchants. And endless credit to pay for it. Probably not. But then again, I’ll bet they didn’t count on America turning into a nation that is (comfortably and numbly) distracted by media reports of Britney Spears, Faux News, and pundits ranting about bleeding heart liberals. That is, in between the advertisements that control our daily lives.

Life takes Visa.
So they say.
And sometimes, Visa takes life.


Lynn NOTTV
Copyright 2007