Religious Radicals with Guns

They tell me it's Father's Day, and to drive home the point I've already had a Bloody Caesar and a ... well, coffee, cards, and new cologne from my wife and children. I've walked the dog and watched the sprinklers do their thing at dawn. And now I've got a little time before the Waterloo opens and serves me a second (in this case, the American, Texa-fied version) Bloody Mary and a big, hearty brunch, and so you don't think Daddy and the Rattle & Hum office is slumming entirely just on account of it's Father's Day ...

On these jihadist-like gun slaughters, Bill Maher and the Republicans and a few others say we should call it what it is: Islamic Extremism. I say we take it a step further and roll in the nuts who happen to be Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, what have you, who also kill, light themselves on fire, blow up abortion clinics, federal buildings, believe Noah's Ark is still hidden under the sea somewhere, think Evolution is just God pulling our legs with a fossil record, who think they have it and the rest of us don't, and along the way manage to talk themselves into believing nonsense a reasonably judicious 10-year-old would think is silly based on the evidence, that we bring the whole bunch into the same corral and call them Religious Radicals. Cover all the bases and not be exclusive and mean-spirited by choosing to single out any particular set of nuts.

Also, lest you think I'm one of these gun pussies. I'm not. I've shot about every kind of gun you can imagine: handguns, rifles, high-powered rifles, shotguns, assault rifles. That said, as Kurt Vonnegut once said: "I wouldn't have one of those motherfuckers in my house for anything." THAT said, I have a lot of swords, and a cane I would pick over everything else in the very unlikely event that things got dicey and I needed to kill someone to protect my family. I also think that, in the age of drones and Blackhawk helicoptors and the like, to think you can protect yourself from a government run amok without owning a SAM (surface-to-air-missile) launcher is just really delusional. Anyway, I don't own guns because I think the odds of me blowing my brains out with one of them is much higher than my using it to protect my home and family. I also think I could easily not get to the gun safe in time and forget the combination at my age if things got really stressful with someone attacking our home, which, again, is unlikely, but, on the other hand, I have my down days, and you might say those sharp swords maybe aren't the smartest thing to have around either, and I'd have a hard time arguing with you.

All that said on this, my Father's Day Sunday, when you could hardly blame me for doing fuck all rather than carry on for free ... I support the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I don't want the First Amendment to go away and therefore accept that the Second Amendment is the law of the land as well. It reads, "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [sic], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Which is to say, the first part contradicts the latter, but—BUT—they didn't have as many MFA programs back then to workshop the sense, the semantics, and so a little latitude needs to be allowed for a judge to interpret, or else what is a Constitutional Judge to do? End up like a novelist? Largely irrelevant to the culture? I wouldn't wish that on them. Anyway, if you read a lot of the other amendments, they, like Revelations, The Dead Sea Scrolls, Salman Rushdie, don't exactly track as clearly as some who think they know and others don't would like us to think.

Also, to be fair to the people who know a thing or two about guns: the assault rifle you can buy at the store is not an automatic weapon. You have to pull the trigger each time you want it to shoot a bullet; they don't just spray out if you hold the trigger down, like in the Rambo movies. Having a magazine that holds lots of ammunition is the bigger issue, and to that more relevant point you might ask, regardless of your politics or fidelity to the Second Amendment: Will that high-capacity magazine help you more than a cane or a shotgun might when some asshole breaks into your home to steal your TV? Perhaps. Or it might kill the family next door. Then again, if the intruder brings his entire extended family or small town with him, that clip might come in handy. But, and perhaps more importantly, will it help destroy that drone sent by the government that is about to blow you to smithereens from way up in the sky, like a top-notch laser-guided SAM launcher might, which, for whatever crazy reason a citizen isn't allowed to purchase legally?

Probably not.

As the Australian comedian Jim Jeffries has said (in a YouTube'd performance you can Google): the best argument beyond a certain debatable reading of the Second Amendment we here in the States have for owning and keeping as many guns as we want is: "Fuck off, we like our guns."

There it is.

In other news: gold is going up, the yield on the 10-Treasury is going down, close to 1.50% in depreciating dollars that you'll get now for lending your government money. I should add, this is much better than the negative rate you would receive for lending the Germans or the Japanese governments money. Expect this counter-intuitive state of affairs to increasingly matter as time goes on. How? Your guess is as good as mine. In fact, explain it as best you can to a ten-year-old, and ask her what she thinks it ought to lead to, and then watch it not lead there right away, but eventually lead there. When? Your guess is as good as mine.

Oh, and before I go, there will be no successful "organic" movement to bounce Trump from the top of the ticket in July. Dream on, Republicans! Join the Berners! They continue to dream as well, though their dream will come closer to passing in time. When? Not this November.

But here it is almost 11:00 AM. Time for Daddy's Bloody Mary and brunch!

Daddy abides.