I’m kinda glad I’m here alone this afternoon with my animals because I keep crying.

I honestly believe in my heart (and you may go ahead and call me a nut or a bleeding heart liberal or whatever) that ALL of these incidents should have been a wake up call and they just keep happening because we aren’t waking the fuck up. I’m really not sure someone opening fire in the nation’s Capitol Building would even have an effect at this point. I just don’t think there’s any way to penetrate the notion that a gun is damned close to being a religious symbol right now.

This didn’t happen overnight. It’s been a long and ugly slog to get here. Now we’re to the place where there are firmly entrenched interests and their nasty little “helpers” (on the internets, the radio, the TV and in Congress as well as state and local governments) that prevent mere discussions of how to fix the problems. Heaven forbid you’d try to actually DO something, you get death threats and intimidated out of even trying. Why is that do you think?

It may not seem connected, but the lack of financial/job security in this country is a big factor. It throws people into a panic and makes them easy prey for those who want us fighting among ourselves over stupid shit. We have a lot of people in our society that don’t feel like they belong anywhere, when you have that, people who might not otherwise fall prey to crazy shit are ripe for the picking. So they form these little insane posses with a gang mentality, that becomes the family they don’t have. I used to know a cop who worked on a gang task force. He told me once that the way to break up these gangs and get kids out of them is to find something better, something with hope and promise, like jobs, education, stable housing, good mentors and foster parents. The lack of those things made his job harder, and he said a lot of the time the cops would focus on one kid, or maybe one family (or what was left of the family) and try to help them outside of their work on keeping gang wars from erupting. One life at a time was the best they could hope for, and he said there were days where that concept was so fucking depressing it made it hard to go to work. He’s dead now, he died in the line of duty.

We need to stop thinking the answer to everything is a gun. I don’t know how you unravel a culture where people think it’s really no big deal to set your baby in front of a giant assed machine gun like it’s a Fisher Price Farm Set. It’s not. It’s a machine designed to kill people. Like your guns, collect them even, but maybe no one should own weapons like that outside of Law Enforcement or Military, they aren’t Hummel figurines FFS. A gun is a machine designed to kill, that’s what it’s for, and it seems like a lot of people want to dance around that and not deal with it. Sure, you can kill people with a freaking rock or a bread knife, but guns make it simple, make it easy to do from a distance and make it a whole lot faster to end a life in less than a second. Do we really need that? Really? I don’t understand this at all, I really fucking don’t. And it’s breaking my heart and making me really sad today. I just can’t even anymore.