Saturday, February 16, 2019

Because priorities!

I know I've been talking about frivolous things a lot recently. Video games, things that are and aren't Coachella, video games again. I guess I just needed something to distract me from the unrelenting trauma that is the national emergency we are apparently in the midst of. Huh? Healthcare? Education? Guns? No, I'm talking about the national emergency that is the President not getting what he wants. 2/15: Never forget.
"What am I supposed to do, not build the wall I promised
the rabid-foam racists who voted for me I would build?"
-Some guy
Getting your hands on guns is
easy, choosing the date is hard.
Although speaking of guns, we did have a fatal mass shooting yesterday in Aurora Illinois. Huh? No, you're thinking of the Aurora Colorado shooting in 2012. This is a whole new Aurora mass shooting. Guess we'll have to call it something else. And just days after the one year anniversary of the Parkland shooting. You know, if you're planning to carry out a massacre, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a day that isn't already the anniversary of some other mass shooting in America.

Did you every read about how the ancient Romans had so many festivals and celebrations that by the time the Empire started to collapse, half the days in the year were holidays? That's us, but with murder.
Never thought we'd outdo the ancient Romans
when it came to murderousness, but here we are...
"Guns don't kill people,
folly artists kill people."

-Dumb idiots
It's gotten so bad that when we hear a loud bang our first and not unreasonable assumption is a mass shooter and not say something that sounds like a gunshot, like a fire cracker or a pan dropped in the kitchen. Even in situations where a room full of people should reasonably expect the sound of simulated gunfire, like say at a play. Say at-oh, wait, heads up, I'm about to spoil Hamilton, which, if you haven't seen it and who has? Tickets are like a million dollars. But if you haven't seen it, listened to the sound track or if you failed middle school social studies, it ends with a shooting.

Last night at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, during the scene where Aaron Burr shoots Alexander Hamilton, a man in the audience suffered a heart attack and had to be carried out. But between the staged gunshot and the general sense that any of us in America can be murdered by a shooter at any moment, someone freaked out.
To be clear, the gunshot was not a surprise. It happens in
a duel, so there's a countdown and everything. They even sing
a song about it first, so it's not like you couldn't see it coming.
"If audience members had more guns
this wouldn't have happened."

-Wayne LaPierre, 
head of the NRA*
Details are pretty fuzzy, but according to witnesses, someone in the house shouted for the lights to come up and people panicked thinking that there'd been an actual shooting, which again, this is America so, 50/50 chance. Two audience members were injured in the chaos, the man who had a heart attack is in critical condition and apparently a child had a seizure of some kind. Basically it was a shit show, but the take away here is that when there's an emergency in a crowded and darkened theatre, assumption one is that someone with issues got their hands on a legal, easily obtained firearm and opened fire.

Holy shit, right? And to be clear, the fault isn't with a panicky audience, I mean what else are they to think? But sure, the President's dumb border wall is a crisis. Oh well, at least this grossly unconstitutional overreach won't ever come back to bite him or the GOP in the ass.
"So if you win, what are you going to declare a national 
emergency first: Education? Guns? Me, I'm thinking healthcare. 
Just naionalize the whole thing. It's going to be sweet."
-Kamala Harris, planning some comeuppance




*Not an actual quote, but 100% what he would say about this. 100%.

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