Stay Classy, Assholes

Today's column for the Daily Banter is a response to what happened last night in Hartford, Connecticut, when a grieving father tried to speak.

Here's an excerpt:

"If you haven't yet seen the video clip of gun enthusiasts heckling Neil Heslin, the father of 6-year-old Sandy Hook shooting victim Jesse Lewis, last night in Hartford, Connecticut, get ready to want to put your fist through a wall. It's so sickening, so profoundly disrespectful that I can't imagine anyone with a soul defending it. There honestly isn't language strong enough to describe the kind of mentality it must take to try to overpower the voice of a man who's holding a picture of his dead child in his hands while he's speaking publicly, fragilely about his personal pain. And to do it simply because you're that obsessed with being able to own as many guns of as many shapes and sizes as your heart desires without ever having to meet an ounce of resistance from anyone is fucking insane. Completely fucking insane."

Read the Rest Here

Safety Worst

Today's column for the Daily Banter is all about living cartoon character Joe Arpaio, whose "posse" is now officially standing guard over Maricopa County, Arizona's schools.

Here's the opening shot:

"I have this great image in my head of Joe Arpaio with a patch over one eye and wearing a long black leather coat, walking into a tiny dishwasher repair shop in a strip mall somewhere in unincorporated Phoenix. He approaches the aging owner of the place, seeming to appear from out of the shadows, and says, 'You’re pretty good with your hands, so good in fact that you’ve become part of a bigger universe — you just don’t know it yet. I’m here to talk to you about a very special team we’re putting together.' He then repeats this same basic thing all across town at various used car dealerships, bowling alleys, Home Depots and blood pressure testing machines at Rite Aid pharmacy. And this is how he puts together his own personal Octogenarian Avengers Initiative."

Read the Rest Here

Quote of the Day

"I spent a career carrying typically either a M16, and later a M4 carbine -- and a M4 carbine fires a .223 caliber round, which is 5.56 millimeters, at about 3,000 feet per second. When it hits a human body, the effects are devastating. It's designed to do that. That's what our soldiers ought to carry. I personally don't think there's any need for that kind of weaponry on the streets and particularly around the schools in America. I believe that we've got to take a serious look -- I understand everybody's desire to have whatever they want -- but we have to protect our children and our police and we have to protect our population. And I think we have to take a very mature look at that."

-- Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal on MSNBC's Morning Joe today

Posted without comment -- because one isn't needed.

Quote of the Day

"I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once."

-- Megan McArdle writing at The Daily Beast

I've tried my best to completely ignore politics and the often idiotic rantings of those who make a living proffering right-wing political opinions since last Friday. I honestly feel like that kind of pettiness should have been put to shame for at least a little while. I don't know, I guess it just seems like it's beneath all of us right now.

But this was unavoidable because Megan McArdle is apparently a very special brand of idiot. It's already been well established that her views are the worst kind of insipid libertarian drivel and that they come from an intellectual featherweight -- why anyone actually pays her to try to think is one of the universe's great mysteries -- but her most recent column crosses the line from dumb into unthinkably offensive.

For most of its painful 4,000 words, it's standard McArdle -- a lot of the-government-can't-do-anything nonsense backed up by arguments a 5th grader would be able to knock holes through -- but then comes the above quote. I never thought I'd be one of those parents, but I guess I am: There's no fucking way humanly possible that Megan McArdle has a child (and if she does, the state she dislikes so much should step in and take him or her away immediately). If you can come up with a worse idea, a more jaw-dropping disaster of a response to the Sandy Hook shooting, than to suggest to your six year old and his or her friends that they should say "let's roll," get into attack formation, and undertake a kamikaze run at a guy armed with an assault rifle, I'm open to hearing it -- although you'd probably be too high to talk.

Ben wrote a really good piece on this today over at Banter and my favorite part about it is that he acknowledges what I kind of alluded to about McArdle, namely that she's such a joke that she barely deserves being mentioned and only gets the honor today because rarely has she herself proven it so spectacularly.

No More

Today's column for the Daily Banter hesitantly wonders if we may finally be on the verge of meaningful change in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.

No excerpt for this one -- just feel free to read if you'd like.

The Daily Banter: Nothing Should Ever Be the Same/12.18.12

Listening Post

A very nice reader named Mary put up a link to this song in the comment section of Friday's post, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't cry while listening to it. I cried a lot this past weekend and I seriously doubt it's going to stop anytime soon.

Here's Pink -- Beam Me Up.

Elegia

There have been times when I've felt like I'm at a loss for words. When I've sat here staring at this computer screen practically in tears, maybe even overcome with rage, because I simply can't find a way to translate the chaos and emotion in my head into actual human language. It's happened before -- but it's never happened like this.

I just keep thinking about my four-year-old daughter, Inara. I can't get her out of my head. Her blonde curls. Her smile. The way she opens her bedroom door and shuffles hesitantly over in her little Hello Kitty pajamas to where I'm working early in the morning -- her purple blanket clutched in both hands and pulled up to her face, her eyes still glossy with receding sleep -- and silently rests her head against me. The sound of her laughing uncontrollably whenever she tells a joke, no matter how often she's told the same joke before. She's like life itself to me. She's my heart and soul. My sine qua non.

I think about that, all of that, and then I try to reconcile those overwhelming feelings with the words and images that have played out all day on my TV. Parents screaming. Tiny children marching in a line to safety as they're led by police armed with automatic weapons. Ambulances lining the streets and police tape strewn throughout a bucolic suburban neighborhood in New England. "27 People Killed in Elementary School Massacre." It goes beyond surreal into the realm of unimaginable. How can our feeble minds even be expected to process it, our frail psyches to make sense of it? How can we ever come to terms with the notion that this is us -- that our society is capable of playing host to something so utterly inhuman? Who are we at this point?

Less than 48-hours after the attacks of 9/11, I was at Ground Zero, standing with a mask over my face next to a still-burning pile of wreckage ten stories high. It was one of the most horrific experiences imaginable. And yet even then, overcome by the sheer magnitude of what had happened and the searing pain it caused, I could at least see some kind of twisted reasoning at work. While the beliefs of those who had attacked us and killed so many may have been insane and misguided, they were at least easy to explain; the men who brought terror to our shores honestly considered themselves warriors, and we were their enemy. We weren't completely helpless then; we knew who had devastated us, why, and what we had to do about it.

But this: an elementary school, a 20-year-old man armed to the teeth, 20 children shot to death while they cowered in class. No matter how hard I try I just can't understand it. Dear God, why? They were just kids. And teachers. Why?

How do we go on from this? How do so many families return home to presents still under the Christmas tree for children who will now never open them -- how do they survive the unsurvivable? How do we as a nation dare to continue calling ourselves human when we tolerate such virulent madness, allowing our leaders to refuse to acknowledge that something has to be done about our obscene and grievously negligent lust for firepower and the right to supposedly wield it as we please? When does it fucking stop?

Now. It stops now. Because it has to.

Enough is enough.

There are admittedly no easy answers, but there have to be answers, because we can't have another one of these. Not like this. This is too much for us to take.