MountainMornings

This Earth Day weekend was spectacular. The rain stopped for our neighborhood’s Third Annual Community Cleanup and people fanned out around our twenty square blocks with garbage bags, claw grabbers and gloves to clean the streets and storm gutters from debris. I found a jury-rigged clothes hanger for breaking into cars, an empty bottle of cinnamon whiskey along with lots of beer bottles, and a discarded sippy cup filled with milk! But the worst culprit by far was cigarette butts.

It’s hard to believe people still smoke, or vape, or whatever. It’s a dirty business, smoking, and I’ve always hated it. As a kid I was stuck in a small house with two chain smokers, and occasionally in a small Corvair with the windows closed. I felt trapped in a cloud of noxious fumes and vowed then and there to never smoke.

I’ve seen the culture change around smoking, and I can only hope to see our culture change around guns. Suicides by gun, “accidental” handgun and hunting accidents, mass murders like our recent Waffle House massacre in TN (our 2nd in a few months), and even the occasional crime of passion are all a national public health emergency.

When the white supremacists in Cville outgunned the local police, well maybe that should have been a good clue – if not Sandy Hook or Parkland.

Maybe we should call out the National Guard? After all they were all stationed in DC for the Women’s March. I waved to them sitting in their buses waiting to be deployed in case things got nasty. They already know how to handle a gun, you wouldn’t have to educate teachers and arm them.

Just put a few National Guardspeople in every school, shopping center, cinema, music concert, sports arena, oh and restaurant…maybe even every workplace? We already have an armed militia, so why not use them to fight our gun nuts?

It would seem the only newsworthy part of the latest mass murder was the killer’s state of undress when a semi nude guy strolled into the Waffle House just a few miles south of here with an AR-15. At least we knew he didn’t have a bomb strapped on his chest. And because he was white, a reporter asked the sheriff if he thought the suspect was “mentally ill!”

Wearing only a jacket, the accused gunman, 29-year-old Travis Reinking, allegedly fatally shot two people outside the Antioch restaurant, police said.

He continued his rampage inside the restaurant, killing two more. Reinking fled the scene completely naked after a customer intervened.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/24/us/tennessee-waffle-house-shooting/index.html

Never mind that he kept an arsenal in his house, that he had waltzed onto the White House lawn before, that his father returned all his guns to him after the FBI had confiscated them…we all need to know WHY?

A white supremacist is a terrorist. A brown jihadist is a terrorist. Anyone with an AR-15 wants to terrorize someone. They ALL may even be mentally ill, so….

You know the definition of crazy right? “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

When we as a country allow these mass murders to happen over and over and over again, we are the very definition of an insane society. When our legislators listen to TV personalities and NRA lobbyists, we the people suffer. The first thing we need to do is get all those weapons of war off our streets, to reinstate the assault weapon ban of 1994.

Or maybe Macron can get Mr T to sign the Paris Climate Agreement? It’s a toss-up, the American people or Mother Earth? Either way, we’ll have to get down and dirty.