OpEds: The Newtown Calamity & the Ya Da Nation

Plus ça change…It’s America after all.

Mike Ingles

The crazies are rumbling. Former Secretary of Education, William Bennett, said on Meet the Press yesterday, in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook, that all schools should have armed guards stationed on the school grounds. Ditto says Louie Gohmert, crazed Congressman from Texas, who went on to decry, “I wish to God she (Dawn Hochsprung, school Principal) had had an M-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids.” Louie, has a real problem with verb tenses.

My emails this morning were full of untruths spawned by the Tea-Party folk, including quotes from dead people— “Any guns in the hands of a decent person is no threat to anybody—except bad people,” Charleton Heston, AKA Moses. And, I received a great photo of an Israeli school teacher, carrying her automatic assault rifle, escorting her class on a field-trip, juxtaposed to a photo of a “No-Weapons” sign outside a school in America. Subtle.

Here comes the NRA.

Children died—yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah—sorry. “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”

This time it’s different. So says the media, so says the liberal politicians flocking to microphones. Diana Feinstein is going to sponsor a bill: yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah. Football players wrote “Sandy Hook” on their taped-up muscles before their Sunday games.

It won’t make any difference. Nothing much will change. The issues that will be brought up are the same as they were last month in Portland—it’s a mental health issue, it’s a Constitutional issue, it’s a emotional issue…and their right! We must take in all of these concerns if we are going to rid ourselves of this evil that has befallen us.

But we won’t.

The NRA will begin with the logical sequence of—let’s not rush into anything, let’s take our time to study the effects of a weapons ban.

Committees will be formed. Time will pass. Congress will look at what’s happening with mental health, and will find that it’s too expensive to fix and will allow the issue to wane. Time will pass. Tea Party types will begin waving the flag—the only way you’ll get my gun is to extract from my cold dead hand. More time will pass. A law will be issued limiting either: the amount of bullets that can be in one magazine, or limiting the sale of certain automatic and semi-automatic weapons. It will have a sunset provision, and, in a few years—yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah.

Somewhere out there is another loner kid, with worms in his brain telling him to get even. His parents bought the Glock 9mm because there had been a number of break-ins in the neighborhood. The Glock can kill up to 30 invaders at a time—just in case it’s a gang of thieves and not just a simple single-man robbery. The loner, after having spoken with his psychologist or therapist or councilor, just last week, will acknowledge the worm god growing in his brain and telling him that people at the Mall or at the movie theater or at the school have wronged the worm—wronged the loner.

He will have no choice.

Yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Ingles is a freelance writer living in Ohio. He has a degree in American Literature from Franklin University, Columbus, Ohio.
duckrun2@aol.com