Assault Weapons

Bushmaster .223

As a result of the horror that transpired last Friday in Newtown, Connecticut (see: Huffington Post) Congress will very likely re-institute the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 … plus a few other palliative measures.  Will this stop such senseless violence?  Unlikely … certainly not the mayhem in the gangland battlegrounds like the south side of Chicago where dozens of teenagers die each week.  Even Connecticut currently has a state-wide ban on assault weapons.  This clearly did not stop Adam Lanza from his twisted vengeance.

But our short-sighted Washington solons will adjourn sometime in January after having put a plaster on the gaping wound of such insanity.  What they likely won’t address are:

-         the culture of extreme violence that pervades Hollywood, the U.S. computer-gaming industry, and all too much of our television programming

-         our country’s turning its back on our need for more mental-health institutions and a reasonable process for keeping our society’s blatantly-psychotic misfits from walking among us.  The notion that every weirdo needs to be “main-streamed” is a sick societal construct that is supported by … and supports the fringes of the  legal profession.  Nonsense!

-         a serious investigation into the effects of many of our psychiatric drugs on large populations of our male teenagers … particularly when dosages are varied or abandoned.  (I happen to believe this well could be the primary reason for the outbreaks of these teenage killings.  To me, there seems a correlation between the hyperbolic increased in the use of such drugs and these Columbine-type events.)

And lastly ... almost as an aside, I fully support the use of drone air-strikes on the hideouts of Muslim terrorists … who too often insinuate themselves among civilians … often resulting in the incidential killing of innocent young children.  With this, I wonder if President Obama thought of the tots that he has killed by proxy when he shed a tear for the youngsters massacred in Newtown, Connecticut?  Life is full of such enigmatic ironies.