Las Vegas is a special place. Clark County is the fastest growing school district in the United States.
There are television commercials that brag that the things that happen in Las Vegas should stay in Las Vegas.
In so many ways, Las Vegas, Nevada, is different from all the other states nearby. It is nothing like California. Even when Las Vegas displays it's most hedonistic side, it will never be San Francisco. At its most humble it is nothing like Utah. It's part of the West, that great frontier. Nevada is near Colorado and Nebraska, and Wyoming, and Arizona, too. The West. The wild, wild, west. Cowboys and rustlers and gunslingers and ranchers. It's all so romantic.
I'm a fan of cowboys. 19th Century cowboys. I'm not so much a fan of post-combustion-engine cowboys, unless we are talking about astronauts, and that is a different conversation.
We've had a couple presidents in the past few decades who fancied themselves cowboys. Ronald Reagan and George W Bush come to mind. Neither of them were really cowboys. Not even close. Both liked to talk about guns, though.
Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, the two presidents who have done the most to destroy America and our standing in the world, took a lot of money from the gun lobby and in their silent acquiescence allowed more and more guns to be manufactured and distributed, usually through unregulated "gun shows" without saying much about gun control or the Second Amendment. Both men carried the great state of Nevada in both of their elections. Nevada is a red state.
Like other red states in the west, Nevada is reeling from an incident where some people with constitutionally-protected guns have shot some people who didn't happen to have their constitutionally-protected guns at hand.
According to The Associated Press:
Six young people were shot Tuesday after they stepped off a bus that had left a high school, with at least one critically hurt, in an attack just blocks from two elementary schools, authorities said.
Gunshots tore through the working class residential neighborhood in northeast Las Vegas just before 2 p.m., Officer Bill Cassell said.
This leaves Utah, Wyomnig, Kansas, and Arizona, as the remaining contiguous states that will likely enjoy a little bit of Second Amendment entertainment before our national celebration of the birth of the Christus is in full-swing.
I certainly hope there is no delay! We don't really want funerals on Christmas Day when all good GOP-supporting "christians" should have their guns locked away as they leave for church services where they can hear about the dangers of homosexuality and abortion, and the peril that the Second Amendment faces if a government official should actually mention that shootings are bad for your health. But, maybe these Second Amendment groupies should start packing heat at church! God knows that you're not safe in a house of worship anymore.
So, we've had constitutionally-protected shootings in Nebraska, Colorado, and Nevada in the past week. And at none of these Second Amendment orgies was a single ordinary citizen present with one of their constitutionally-protected handguns to exercise their Second Amendment right to defend themselves (from criminals who have constitutionally-protected guns).
So, if we are all supposed to have the constitutional right to keep automatic weapons and handguns (ostensibly to protect ourselves), why are they never available for protection during these incidents of crime?
And why do the children of the owners of these guns so often use the constitutionally-protected weapons to kill passersby?
At what point do we as a society ask: how many deaths by gunshot is too many? How many dead children will we need? Or, worse, how many shoppers must be killed trying to worship at the altar of the almighty dollar?
More?
I can't wait to read the gun-lobby apologists' blogs this week.
Oh! And, sadly, what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas: 6 shot after exiting Vegas school bus
Dick Mac Recommends:
What's the Matter with Kansas?
Thomas Frank
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