He Said What? (redress)

Last night after I posted this entry to my blog, He Said What?, I thought about it, and I wanted to go full satire on the thing.  I support the privilege of those responsible enough to keep and bear arms.  I do feel that there needs to be changes made in the system to catch people who own and use firearms when they have no legal right to and those people who are to foolish from having guns.  I know a man that has shot himself several times, once with just a bullet and a lighter, he in no way needs access to anything more than a piece of paper. 


Anyway, I was going to redo that pot as full blown satire, completely mocking those who really believe that the government is going to come in the middle of the night and seize guns from private citizens, but it was not in me to go that far with it.  Instead I chose to leave it as it was partially satire, in which the government forgoing a "gun grab" decided to opt to solve the problems I feel create an environment for gun violence.  But I was going to add more to it, using satire and comedy to raise awareness to these problems.  Socioeconomic problems (homelessness, poverty), metal illness, bullying, abuse, with the addition of drug use.

Then I woke up this morning, got online, and saw not just a shooting (a retired police officer shooting a man for texting in a movie), but another school shooting.  Another two wasteful tragedies.  Despite what some people think, as a gun owner, these types of events make me ill, these types of things should not be happening.  This is the type of problem that requires a fundamental shift in thinking.  We have to look at ourselves, we helped to create this environment through various means, and while we can never fix what has already happened, we can stop it from continuing.  But as for that post, I feel it is best even in bad taste, much like this one is, to leave it alone.

We have so many issues that we must tackle, and so little focus to fix them all.  I can try to explain away the retired police officer shooting as just another cop who felt he was a tough guy.  I can try to say the guy was full of himself, thought he was beyond reproach and could act in any way he saw fit, Judge Dredd if you will.  So many police officers are like that, they feel they are the law, above reproach, people who should not be officers of the law, because they feel they are better.  But this shooting in Roswell, I cannot begin to attempt to explain it away.  A middle school no less, but unlike previous shootings, I have heard they got the shooter.  This time, we can learn something about the motives.  Until then, I hope that those who were injured will be alright, as alright as one can be.