Ad Nauseam

     The first thing I thought when I heard about the mass shooting in Las Vegas, information that included the name and age of the perpetrator, a sixty-four year old retired white man, was that he wasn't committing his crime on behalf of ISIS and that he wasn't a Muslim.  He didn't fit the profile of what quick-judging Americans think of as a terrorist; yet, he terrorized thousands of concertgoers, killed fifty-nine people and wounded 525.  I heard later that the automatic rifle fire went on for about twelve minutes, or half the length of a sitcom.
     He managed to sneak twenty-three automatic rifles into his hotel room.  From a high vantage point he had a good view of the large flat space where the country music festival was taking place.  Nobody  knows why he did it.  His brother said, "He was just a guy."
     President Trump pronounced the massacre "an act of pure evil."  Trump, like all Republicans and some Democrats, supports the NRA, gun rights, is against gun control.  Trump admitted more than once last year that he has a pistol strapped to his ankle.  Imagine that slob who never exercises trying to bend at the waist to get access to a pistol he wouldn't be able to use effectively because he has no experience in combat situations, a choice he made when he complained to the Vietnam-era draft board about his hurting foot, and years later he couldn't remember which foot it was--in other words, there was nothing wrong with his foot.
     Trump's lack of fighting experience mirrors all tough-talking Second Amendment propagandists, like gun enthusiast Ted Nugent, who, during the Vietnam War years, avoided military service by making himself so repulsive (not bathing, shitting on himself, becoming a derelict) that he was rejected automatically as physically and mentally unfit for duty.  He's clean now, but inside he's still a cowardly shit.
     Bill O'Reilly, another tough talker with no combat experience, claims that the Las Vegas massacre is "the price of freedom."  In some of the on-site footage I saw two young women running along, and then dropping to the pavement at the sound of another volley of gunfire before they got up again, moving in a herky-jerky way, clearly freaked out of their minds.  If O'Reilly or Ted Nugent or Donald Trump were to ever undergo such an experience, would the words out of their mouths regarding the Second Amendment (which says nothing of lone gun maniacs with automatic weapons and endless ammunition, but mentions a "well-regulated militia," a body that would not accept a solitary creep with a penchant for mass murder) be modified?  Would they denounce the NRA's knee-jerk reactions to such events?
     Over and over, robotically, because it's a talking point, the NRA-infected political class (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders--the snake who speaks to the press for Trump) says that "this is not the time to be politicizing this tragedy.  The bodies haven't even been buried."
     They said the same thing after the murders of twenty children in Newtown, Connecticut, the mass murder (committed by a mentally ill young man) that moved President Obama to declare how fed up he was, not realizing, apparently, that he's ordered missile strikes in the Middle East that have killed far more children than twenty.  Oh well, he tried, and failed, to get America behind the idea that gun control needs to happen.  That it shouldn't be easy to obtain unlimited amounts of ammunition, that it's crazy to allow semi-automatic and automatic weapons to be bought legally in the first place.
     Every time a gun massacre happens, this dispute goes on: don't politicize this because the victims must be honored, the families prayed for, thoughts sent their way.  On the other hand (the one not holding the gun) it's exactly the right time to bring up gun control, to fight the NRA.  The NRA, ironically, benefits from mass casualty situations brought about by people with guns.  Gun sales go up.  Guns, like metal and plastic flowers, rose from the graves of the children of Newtown.  Guns will be sold massively after Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, because that's the site of so many gun shows that it's practically a daily thing.
     Trump will visit Las Vegas on Wednesday, Puerto Rico on Tuesday.  He's sent many a corrosive and vile tweet criticizing the heroic Mayor of San Juan for her strident and honest assessments of the slow and incompetent U.S. government response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria.  In true Trump fashion, he doesn't like it when someone doesn't pay tribute to him.  The poor and downtrodden are supposed to thank the masters for the scraps thrown their way, not comment on the paucity of offerings.
   
                                                                           Vic Neptune