Monday, October 22, 2012

Our "Gun" Dilemma

Sunday: Another mass shooting followed by a suicide.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/21/brookfield-square-mall-shooting_n_1997744.html?utm_hp_ref=crime&icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl1|sec1_lnk1%26pLid%3D223394

So, if you are POed at the world, get yourself a cheap gun and take it out on innocent strangers.   Why just die alone?

Suggests we need to get the guns off the streets, right?  But then... but then... Here's a little something I wrote over the weekend, which will be my half of next Saturday's "Generation Gasp" column:


      In the 1942 classic film “Casablanca” the new Nazi in town asks Rick (Humphrey Bogart) if he could imagine German soldiers in New York City.  Rick replies that there are some New York neighborhoods that the Third Reich would be well advised to steer clear of.
       At least one town in Oklahoma can be added to Rick’s list of American environs the bad guys had best avoid.  Calera is the community where last week a 12-year-old girl shot some guy who was trying to get into her house.  According to the local sheriff, the bad guy was turning the doorknob when the kid fired a round through the front door and dropped him.  Later she told the local TV station, “I see a lot of girls on TV that get their house broken into and they turn up missing and just knowing that that could have happened to me. I was scared.”
       This budding Annie Oakley should “friend” Iravia Cotton and Rachel Johnson, two Texas Girl Scouts, who took off after the thieves who stole their cookie earnings in front of a Fort Bend Walmart back in March.  Thief Number One grabbed the kids’ cash box and jumped into the getaway car, driven by his accomplice.  Iravia ran up to the passenger side window and started punching the culprit.  Rachel grabbed the driver-side door handle.
        Recalled Iravia to the media, “Me and my friend, Rachel, went after the money and then they tried to hit me with the car. I started hitting the boy that was in the passenger seat, so I think he learned his lesson a little bit.”  Rachel held on, as the crooks drove away.  She got a bit banged up, but suffered no serious injuries.  “Who steals from a Girl Scout?” she asked afterwards.  “It’s the worst thing ever.”
        I’m reading a great new book about the ten-year hunt for Osama bin Laden, called “Manhunt.”  The author makes the point that, when the al-Qaeda kingpin authorized the 9/11 strikes, he thought America would turn tail and run away from the Middle East.  He assumed we were soft people who couldn’t tolerate wartime casualties.  A few months later, when the bombs were raining on his Tora Bora hideout and his Taliban pals had been ousted from Kabul, he realized how wrong he was… not unlike the Nazi colonel in Rick’s bar, who takes a fatal bullet in the belly at the film’s climax.
         Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated how tough the younger generation of Americans is.  But just in case anyone in the world still harbors a doubt, I commend you to Iravia and Rachel and the little gal with the six shooter in Calera, OK.
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Do I trust our government --- any government --- enough to willingly be disarmed?  In a pigs eye!
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