Day: October 4, 2017

So it turns out I will indeed be attending NYCC. Marvel Comics found room for me at their section of Artists Alley. I will be at table M2 and will have plenty of stuff to sell. Come on by.

PAD

That’s just a fact that liberals have to accept. Just like we will never get rid of the Electoral College. There will be much flailing of hands and demands for action when things go bad (mass shootings, Democrats winning the popular vote and having to watch their opposition be sworn in) and yet nothing will ever be done to change the problem, and the cause for the consternation will eventually slip away into the news cycle.

The people in Vegas have suffered terribly, just as the parents of the slaughtered school children in Sandy Hook did. And the students and parents of Columbine High School, and all the way back to the victims and relatives of the first lone wolf shooter in New Jersey, in 1949, who shot thirteen people dead and wounded three more. The fact is that between mass shootings, individual shootings, and suicides, more Americans have died than all Americans in every war that we have fought combined.

And it’s not going to change, because politicians are too afraid of the NRA to stand up to them. Either you have to swear that you’re not coming after people’s guns, as Clinton did, or you have to waver or flip flop on your stand, as Trump did. (He used to call for assault rifle bans and praised Obama’s attempts to introduce gun control after Newtown, CT; both positions went away when he ran for president.).

Making life easier for shooters, that they can do, which is why they are currently working to allow silencers. Because they’re so worried about shooters’ hearing. My attitude is simple: let them lose their hearing. They’re deaf to complaints anyway, so what use is hearing to them?

Nancy Pelosi even wasted her time sending a letter to Paul Ryan asking for, at minimum, a bi-partisan committee be formed to investigate what would be done to curb gun violence. Ryan’s response was that there was no need to institute laws about gun control as, say, Australia had done, which caused their mass gun slaughter incidents to drop to zero and cut in half all other gun violence. Instead Ryan insists that we must focus on mental health care…which I would believe actually meant something if he hadn’t been trying to do away with the ACA for seven years so no one could have money for seeing a psychiatrist.

Unfortunately I’ve resigned myself to the fact that gun legislation will never change as long as politicians remain afraid of the NRA. Not ever. Not as long as politicians and conservative news pundits declare that a mass shooting is not the time to discuss it, even though that’s a stipulation never made in association with any other disaster or attempted murder. One guy unsuccessfully tried to sneak a bomb through the TSA in his shoes and immediately we all had to take our shoes off going through the airport. No one said, “This isn’t the time to talk about shoe bombs” without presenting a time it would be. But as long as the NRA is around there will never be a time to discuss guns.

I would love to be wrong about that, but I’m pretty sure I’m not.

PAD