Thoughts on yesterday

I wanted to give myself time to let the Virginia Tech tragedy all sink in before responding with any kind of knee-jerk reaction, thus I waited a day, and here’s what I have to say…

Obviously, this miscreant was a nut-job, but even without the guns, he may well have found another way to commit these sickening acts, but it seems to me that the magnitude of this tragedy would have been lessened considerably if this whacko didn’t have such easy access to semi-automatic weaponry!  Now, before all you NRA-types out there get your collective panties in a wad, I’m not calling for a ban on ALL guns—what I’m saying is there need to be more restrictions on access to certain types of guns.

Charmin’ Chuck Heston, Ted Nugent and the rest of NRA-nation are going to have to go a long way to convince me that anyone other than military or law enforcement personnel have any need whatsoever to own semi-automatic handguns or rifles!  What the fuck are these kind of weapons doing in the hands of private citizens?  Sorry Ted, but you don’t need a fucking Uzi to kill rabbits, ducks, elks, or any other wild animals, and you can’t convince me otherwise.  Maybe I'm naïve about all this, but if you take away the semi-automatic aspect of yesterday's shootings, we might only be talking about ten deaths instead of 33.  Normal sane people shouldn’t even have access to this stuff—let alone psychotics like this creep who shot up Virginia Tech—yet these weapons are so damn easy to obtain in our country.  Hell, look at Columbine—those two little bastards amassed an arsenal that some small countries would be envious of, and they were high school students!

I have no doubt there will be tons of excuses spewed forth over the next few days from the NRA, but I’m so fucking tired of hearing their hackneyed rhetoric about it being their patriotic right (not to mention my patriotic duty) to bear arms.  And, oh by the way, I felt this way long before the likes of Michael Moore came along, so save your breath before you accuse me of being a "bleeding-heart" liberal.  Something’s got to change, folks…