There's something that bothers me about this story about gun shops teaching kids to shoot from the Chicago Tribune.
GAT Guns in East Dundee started offering these classes about a year ago because parents wanted to bring their kids in to shoot, manager Randy Potter said.
Another store — On Target Range and Tactical Training Center in Crystal Lake — offers a class to children ages 7 to 11 on firing .22-caliber rifles. At GAT, the children are trained on pistols.
“We couldn’t allow them to come in cold, not knowing what the parent and the child’s shooting ability was like,” Potter said. “Well, now what we do in the class is put them through and give them a card that fits in a wallet. They can show it at the counter, and the people at the counter will know that kid has been trained in safety and gun handling so it’s OK to let them shoot.”
The sound of gunfire is constant from the two shooting ranges inside the store, pistols upstairs, larger weapons downstairs. LED lights illuminate paper targets that glide back and forth at the command of the shooter and a touch-screen computer.
On the second floor, rifles line the walls and handguns fill display cases. To the side is a door leading to the classroom, which can hold a few dozen students. The first floor is taken up mostly by display racks of ammunition.
Before the children arrived, Wayne Inzerello sat in front of the room with a roster and a collection of bullets, ranging in size from bigger-than-your-thumb to smaller-than-a-fingernail.
In walked Sergio Meilman with his 12-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter, carrying a gun case, a box of ammunition and two sets of ear protection like airport workers wear.
Inzerello checked the kids in and made sure their names were spelled right, then asked them to take a seat up front. He repeated the routine as the room filled, trying to put the nervous ones at ease.
More than half of the four girls and 13 boys had fired guns before.
I grew up in western North Carolina, where rifles especially were tools that signified you were a responsible person. The implicit understanding growing up in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains was that you learned to care for the rifle, clean it, load and unload it, and all the "boring" safety stuff before you ever were allowed to actually fire one, and that's what the NRA stood for.
Here's my question. Imagine all the kids and the instructors in the above picture were black and/or Latino. Would you still feel the same way about kids in suburban Chicago having firearms class?
I'm thinking the answer is no.
That's what's bothering me about the fetishization of firearms.
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Truly, both sides are evil and it would be great if both sides could lose. I spent some time in Syria and I know some of the places that have been destroyed, and it breaks my heart that I will never see Aleppo again. I knew some good people, but I can only speculate as to what might have become of them.
So it fills me with cold fury to see the smug little bastards at FireDogLake and the Daily Kos do their gleeful tapdance every time President Obama takes any action - or doesn't take any action, for that matter. In this horrible situation, as a matter of national policy, there are only unsatisfactory options. Therefore, to the ghouls, the President is wrong no matter what he does or doesn't do and that is as good a pretext as any to gibber and squeal and trash the Neoliberal Third Way New Democrats who in their eyes are responsible for everything wrong and unpleasant in this world.
What they never explain, and they never will, is exactly how turning the government over to the Republicans - after the Democrats have been suitably chastised - is going to make anything better for anyone. Gays? Women? People of Color? The Poor? The Sick? The Scientista? The non-idiot Left? All shit out of luck. The benefits go to the Republicans and their toadies, and the rest of us squander another generation cleaning up the big stinking mess - like the twenty years wasted on Reagan, and the twenty years currently wasting on Bush.
"What they never explain, and they never will, is exactly how turning the government over to the Republicans - after the Democrats have been suitably chastised - is going to make anything better for anyone. Gays? Women? People of Color? The Poor? The Sick? The Scientista? The non-idiot Left? All shit out of luck."
Well put--and it is very true. I guess they feel that the damage the GOP will do will be so much that there will be a great uprising and there will finally be a liberal utopia. Of course, it's a load of bull-pucky, this utopian nonsense (just like the New Athiests' "no religion" utopia). The fact that they ignore--or just don't give a damn--about all the people that will be hurt is truly disturbing. Then again, it's not as if their heads will be on the chopping block--you know, privelige and all that.
"privelige and all that" is exactly right: the smug little bastards know that they won't be doing any of the suffering. Suffering is for little people, for stupid people, for the cannon fodder in the violent revolution that the kossacks gossip about and the firebaggers intend to lead while others do the killing and the dying. I despise these people and their empty chatter. They are big talk about how great it will be when all the Christians are dead, but I don't any of them down at the pantry trying to help the poor in the here and the now. They mock the idea that Jesus will return in Glory, but He will be back before they get their stupid revolution.
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