re: #32 Mich-again

In a friendly debate with a GOP co-worker today I told him I do not think it is possible to truly secure a weapon in your house, period. If a criminal was standing there with a knife holding your kid or wife hostage screaming at you to open the safe, you’d open it. He had to accept that as true..

I got to listen to a Loud Howard co-worker’s legal theory on the Death Penalty today, after he expressed support for arming teachers to the teeth. Apparently the downside of an untrained, under-gunned teacher getting into a shootout inside a crowded school was lost on him. “Well if you’re going to shoot it down with an extreme example…” he says. What? Fucking good sense is extreme now?

Anyway, his Death Penalty theory, in short: kill anybody who looks guilty to save taxpayer money, preferably with an assembly line. I tried to point out that the threat of death wasn’t exactly a deterrent to the Radical Loser types who go on spree killings, but I think he just wanted to tell everyone about how he wanted to kill people without due process.

Worse yet, when I expressed annoyance about this to my girlfriend - a Church-of-Christ-3-times-a-week, twice-on-Sunday “Christian” - she said that somebody caught in the act of a mass shooting wasn’t entitled to due process or a trial, and should be executed on the spot. I pointed out that this was barbaric, un-American, against the rule of law, and extremely hypocritical, and she didn’t care. She also didn’t understand why it was hypocritical, but I wasn’t going to get into an argument about religion… If she can’t figure out what’s hypocritical about a Jesus worshiper calling for execution without fair trial, and if she doesn’t know that this Jesus character was supposed to have been a member of a people who essentially define themselves by establishment of justice, nothing I say is going to matter.

Oddly enough, the one person in the room who expressed agreement with me, that he wouldn’t mind undergoing a background check or restrictions before owning a center-fire semi-auto, was the one guy in the room who had actually been in the Army in the 90s and had spent some time on the ground in Somalia and Haiti.

Sometimes, I don’t think we’re going to make it.