I'm sitting here eating my traditional February 14th meal of tacos and wine and watching a cell-phone video of a SWAT team clearing a classroom in Florida where terrified teenagers shake with fear holding their hands in the air. I find it jarring but I suppose that it's actually a pretty typical scene in a country that seems to have more guns and thoughts and prayers, than they do political brains or balls.
Before you get that wide-eyed look of panic: don't. I'm not going to write yet another thing about guns. If you're reading this you either already agree with me or you're planning on shooting me and either way I'm not really in a position to argue. Sure, I could point out for the umpteenth time that the United States is - by several orders of magnitude - the only country in the world in which this regularly happens, and I could demonstrate that that every jurisdiction in the Western world that makes it harder to buy guns and doesn't let you buy assault rifles experiences fewer gun deaths and almost no mass shootings.
Perhaps I could even point out that as I write this the number of fatalities is 17...10 more than were killed by Al Capone's gang during the 1929 St Valentine's Day Massacre that led to the National Firearms Act and the banning of machine guns, or that the same Republicans who insist the problem isn't guns but insanity are in fact the very same Republicans who gut mental health program spending and pass gun laws making it easier for people with mental health issues to buy assault rifles.
At any rate, the large-scale slaughter of their own children combined with a complete lack of political will to take even the most modest steps to prevent it seems to be the definitive property of the United States; the modern manifestation of American Exceptionalism.
Happy Valentine's Day or whatever, I guess.
[The Publisher has been informed that the author insists on making this an ongoing series and will return shortly to "call out that goddamned negligent father who murdered his kids with snake-oil quackery and then got a keynote sales pitched at a Wellness convention run by the shitheads who deserve to be drowned in a bathtub alongside the NRA national leadership"]
