No More Mr. Nice Guy!

The Three R's: Readin', 'ritin', reloadin'

Arizona's gun loonies never cease to amaze with their utter stark raving idiocy. Unfazed by the failure of their pet legislation to allow guns in bars, a cretinous crusade that was deservedly lampooned by the Daily Show and brought worldwide embarrassment to the state, these mouth-foaming gun worshippers now want to force guns into schools.

This lunatic idea is being rammed through the Arizona legislature by a couple of extreme hard-right imbeciles, Senate Leader Thayer Verschoor and "worst legislator of the year" and five-times-married defender of family values Karen Johnson. Because, is there anything scarier that a classroom full of unarmed children?

Proponents of the measure frame their arguments in terms of the usual mindless gun-fetishist theology about "good guys" and "bad guys", and the good guys should be allowed to fire back at the bad guys, yada yada yada. The problem of course is that Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter at Virginia Tech, was a "good guy" right up to the moment he killed his first victim. Will the gun fetishists guarantee that a "good guy" who has been dumped by his girlfriend or flunked an important exam will never turn into a "bad guy" and start shooting?

This is the point that gun nuts (deliberately) never get. They just take it for granted that the bad guys will be armed and there is nothing we can do about it - the guns just fall out of the sky into the hands of the bad guys - so the only thing we can do in response is arm the good guys to the teeth, and keep them in an arms race against the bad guys. The solution to the problem of gun violence is always more guns. How convenient for the gun industry, the beneficiary of the gun nuts' frantic efforts at gun proliferation! The nuts refuse to acknowledge the obvious fact that this crazy and dysfunctional system creates a vicious cycle that makes it even easier for "bad guys" to get all the guns they want.

It's too bad that our insane gun laws have created the need for armed security in schools in the first place. But armed security must be provided by trained law enforcement officers. A roomful of Walter Mittys blasting away only makes a bad situation even more nightmarish. This stupid and brain-dead legislation is all about letting immature juvenile wannabes indulge their macho fantasies - it is not about protecting children.