Not the modern day Billy the Kid shootist in Orlando, the Keystone Cops on Capitol Hill–or is that Capital Hill? An NRA accounting shows it all: from a mid-six figure graft to Thom Tillis’s $4.4 million support, including our Senate Majority leader who is presently standing in the way of the government’s functioning, Mitch McConnell’s $1.3 million. Many of those Senators voted to allow terrorist suspects to gain a license to kill–I mean, allowed them to buy military grade automatic weapons. (See http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/thoughts_and_prayers_video_20160616.) Perhaps the greatest purveyor of arms in the world, The DOD, is now supplying arms to internal US distributors? Though, I think the NRA is more akin to a pusher: “But the pusher don’t care / Ah, if you live or if you die. . .Oh but the pusher is a monster / Good God, he’s not a natural man. . .Lord, he’ll leave your, he’ll leave your mind to scream. . . .God damn the pusher man.” (The Pusher, Steppenwolf–because it doesn’t matter what a pusher sells, he’s a monster).
Our lawmakers rally round the flag of the insane and the felons and the suspected terrorists, so torn and abused the Stars and Stripes of Fort McHenry look newly sewn and hot off the needle of Betsy Ross.
Same old same old.
Nothing will get better, no solution will be found, as long as our Lawmakers and The People keep blaming the individual when, in fact, the problem is sociocultural. America likes guns. America likes blowing people away. America believes that if you kill the problem, you got no problem–our pop culture, TV and movies, show this. Hell!–even our heroes are violent and destructive, as violent and destructive and conscienceless as our villains.
There is no such thing as blind justice in this country, but there is gun justice–and it is blind, so everything’s cool. Blind rage. Blind to responsibility. Blind to results. In truth, the Blind Man is here with 43 states allowing concealed weapons with a permit and–the love of every gun-totin’ cowboy–eight states that allow concealed carry without a permit: Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. Ironically, though, these eight states have relatively few mass shootings: 0-10 between 1986 and 2016. Most of the shootings happen on the East Coast while Hawai’i, Wyoming, West Virginia, North Dakota, New Hampshire and peninsular Michigan do not engage in mass shootings.
As long as the pushers and the distributors are making money and spending money–it takes money to make money–you can bet your life there’ll be no solution and that old off-key merry-go-round will keep on turning just like Tina Turner’s Big Wheel and Robert Krumb’s cartoon Keep on Truckin’–which came from the singing of Blind Boy Fuller.
Oh, yeah. And people will keep on dying in numbers. Can’t forget them. The innocent bystanders. The nation’s collateral damage.
Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe got it right when they asked, “What’s the matter with the mill?” Answer: “It done broke down.”
talesofthefloatingworld 