Grief and Grievance.
In Illinois this is a sticker you see everywhere on the front doors and windows of municipal buildings, restaurants, boutique storefronts, theaters, and dozens of other types of establishments. I hate seeing this sticker.
I don’t hate it for the overt demand, mind you, but for what it represents in our ongoing firearms dialogue. The fact that you see this sticker everywhere is yet another concession to this entitled minority crowd of weapon manufacturers and consumers, another manner of common sense being turned upside down. This sticker shouldn’t have to exist. The default condition should be that guns aren’t allowed in these buildings; you shouldn’t have to explicitly state otherwise.
But here we are nonetheless.
Here we are putting children and their teachers through drill after drill about how to maybe remain one of the few survivors of a random attack on their school. Here we are with communities being terrorized by self-described “activists” who wander the streets in broad daylight in their tactical vests and ammunition belts brandishing the most advanced bullet-spitters money can buy, communities who are told that the authorities are powerless to do anything because open-carry is permitted in that region, but please do call us back if it turns out they start murdering — we will have a response team over to you in mere minutes, by which time the assailant might only have fired a few hundred rounds. Here we are suffering through another carousel of deflections from each of the usual culprits, blaming mental health, blaming video games and film, blaming an absence of Christianity, blaming architectural decisions, blaming victims, blaming literally everything but the volume of firearms and the ease of access to them.
Here we are held hostage to the whims of people so fearful inside of the prospect they might come to harm that they fight tooth and nail to make sure anybody who wants to can do as much harm as they desire. Here we are enabling an addiction, not to the machinery itself as much as how the machinery makes the addicted feel while they’re holding it. Here we are watching elected public servants use their platforms to crow and joke about how many bills they’ve sponsored and signed to gut what regulations remain and then using those same platforms to make their interns rubber-stamp a message of thoughts and prayers to the families they never cared about enough to protect from their malpractice.
My parents moved to San Antonio last year, and earlier this year my mother’s Illinois driver’s license expired. Driving a car is an activity she has performed safely for nearly 50 years, and the difficulty she’s having renewing that license right now is several levels above what will be asked of the next angry young Texan who walks into his local gun store and solemnly swears he won’t use his killing machine to kill anyone.
I know I’m repeating myself.
I’m tired of repeating myself.
But here we are.
Creative Control 