INSANITY: WE LOVE IT…IF I SEE ONE MORE TEDDY BEAR SHRINE, I THINK I WILL SCREAM

INSANITY: WE LOVE IT…IF I SEE ONE MORE TEDDY BEAR SHRINE, I THINK I WILL SCREAM

By Mark L. Taylor from The Daily Call, October 2, 2015

We’re at the beginning of the tenth month of the year and we have  — as of yesterday — witnessed 45 school shootings in the United States this year. Forty-five. The year is not yet done and you can bet before this bloody year is out, more students will be gunned down at their desks, in the hallways of their schools or while eating lunch in the cafeteria, studying for a math test, or biology quiz or … whatever.

Prepare for the reflexive, regurgitated display of faux national concern and compassion.

Get ready for more sidewalk shrines of teddy bears and balloons and votive candles enveloped in billows of flower bouquets. There will be shocked accounts of how the shooter stalked his victims and those who survived playing dead … or hiding in closets … or under desks … or behind doors … or under dead classmates.

Once again we will be told that people thought it was a joke … or just fireworks, and, of course, that it “couldn’t happen here”.

We will have the usual defense of military grade high power, high capacity weapons in the hands of anyone with the money to buy them. We will be told that the right to bear such hellish weaponry trumps the right of children to live; to be free we must be held captive to our own brand of cultish domestic terrorism

Following the advice of media damage control consultants, the NRA will fall silent for a few days and then come out blaming everything but the guns — at the same time they cash fat checks from the firearms and ammo industries and dash off more checks to congress.

They will say that the answer to gun violence is to have more “good guys” packing their own weapons. The grateful gun industry will round-up theirFlowers laid on the ground near a mass shooting sight donations for the month.

We will have the usual assorted AM radio evangelicals blaming it all on the absence of prayer in the schools and the need to get the children “reading the word of God”.

There will be the usual calls to bring “much needed sanity” to the nation’s gun laws. There will be a few grieving fathers or mothers courageously standing up to champion reform, before they are silenced by the bullying online abuse of gun nut whack jobs with IQs lower than their level of empathy.

There will be the usual useless circle-jerk braying of politicians who lack the courage to act but the willingness to cash those plump checks from the NRA.

Gun sales will — to the delight of those NRA-backing gun manufacturers — bump up and there will be a run on various calibers of ammo. In some places the shelves will be emptied by gun owners convinced the feds are on their way to scoop up the ammo.

We will be told the shooter was either “a nice guy, kinda’ quiet” or “a little bit odd, but I never thought he’d do something like this.

The story will take up two to three days — rarely more — of air time on Tee-Vee news and then disappear as we get back to the all-important business of football and selling shit nobody needs. Until, that is, a few weeks from now when a fresh batch of young sacrificial lambs for the gun lobby pile up in new classrooms and school stairwells.

On that day, I will look up from my phone, computer screen or nearby Tee-Vee and say to whoever is nearby, “Hmm, there has been another shooting.”

The candles at the newest sidewalk shrines will sputter out in a few days. The dead will be buried. The teddy bears will disappear to whatever dank and distant landfill containing the last tattered scrap of America’s basic morality and civic responsibility.

We are all insane.

And we love it.

If we didn’t, we would do something about it. But we won’t, so it will happen again.

We are all insane.

And we love it.