Hee hee hee…oh, it’s all just so, so funny. Sigh…
OK, here goes:
No, I don’t blame Sarah Palin for it. She’s just a small part of the problem, and the problem is epidemic. No one should be surprised by any of this, it’s been coming for some time, and judging by the response from the right-wing nutjobs it’s hardly over. Ever since Obama became president there has been a fever in this country. Completely unjustified, but a fever still. An angry white mob suddenly discovered what the former president had left behind and took its wrath to the man just on the job. Didn’t help that he was a Black Man, but no, that had nothing to do with it!
Anyway, this combustible atmosphere gathered 2nd Amendment fanatics for rallies under the Tea Party name, scrawling signs that threatened a less peaceful and more fully-armed response (“We came unarmed…this time!”). But it wasn’t just ordinary folks who took up the battle cries; Sharron Angle, in her failed quest to unseat Harry Reid in Nevada, declared that “people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”
Palin famously advised her followers: “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!” Michelle Bachmann–what, are the Republicans using the women as soft weapons or what?!?–warned of tyranny and revolution if Obama and the Democrats continued to get their way. And all powered to the people through a right-wing media juggernaut, Fox News, and their corresponding talk-radio counterparts.
So this is just the history leading up to the point. We all saw it. None of this is news. But it did not go unnoticed:
The fact that an unstable man could get the weaponry to perform such an act is a separate problem, huge and essential to all of this. But in Arizona it is apparently legal to enter your local saloon armed and loaded and ready for some boozin.’ Makes sense, yeah? But it’s a problem I long ago gave up trying to understand, because I live in America! We love our guns. We need them. And so if this deranged man is able to shoot off 31 shots and then stop to reload (not retreat!), well, what the hell are we supposed to do, deprive him of his 2nd Amendment rights?!?
So no, not surprising. But man, I do worry about our president’s safety, and all of those folks in public service, even more.
UPDATE:
And one more thing: when is the concealed weapon thing going to work? I often hear as an argument, in places where gun laws are stricter, that vigilantes are prevented from stopping such attacks. An armed citizenry could have taken this guy out and prevented more bloodshed! Or, if only the church-goers/students in the library/fast-food patrons would have been packing heat! But this. Never. Happens. Not even in a gun-crazy state like Arizona. Oh, one day…one day it will! But this time it was a 61 year old woman who stopped the killer from further damage. By grabbing his spare ammo. Now that’s courage, you gun-nuts.