I'd been holding this essay in reserve. I knew that it would only be a short matter of time before one of the newly armed hikers in our National Parks started killing our top predators. My only regret about this story is that the "hiker" who fired the shots will not himself be shot down like the rabid dog he is. (And I'm sick of mentioning the 30K+ people shot to death every year in the USA.)
If you don't want to deal with the realities of hiking in grizzly bear country, then don't go! If you feel the need to carry a weapon because bears frighten you, then point the barrel of your loaded gun to your skull and pull the trigger. But don't hike in our wilderness areas, you gun-humping morons.
You Spoiled Rotten Asswipes
Great Jove, now I have to worry about guns in our National Parks. Shit! How long before gun-mad shitheads shoot the first bear, wolf, or bison (or hiker) in our parks?
The group I fondly refer to as the Nazi Rat Assholes have always been, to me, the perfect example of the spoiled rotten brat. They have their stinking guns and if one even mentions the regulation of these insane weapons of mass destruction, they go into a full-on wacko temper tantrum. Like a goddamned whiny asshole. It's kind of like having hundreds of thousands of little Kim Jong-ils around. Only they don't have nyewkyewler weapons. Not yet, at least.
Typical gun owner reaction to sane gun control.
The USA is a madhouse of a nation packed with firearms which produce tens of thousands of murders and unintentional gun-related deaths each and every year. The latest figures that I could confirm from the CDC were for 2006 (a Bush-the-unelected year) and they indicate just shy of 31,000 deaths due to firearms within the USA. I couldn't locate any reliable numbers for gun-related injuries, but these must be many times greater than the numbers of killed.
If any nation on Earth has proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the average citizen should not be allowed anywhere fucking near a gun, much less private ownership of them, it is the USA. Who tends to have and hoard and use these guns? Criminals and racist groups. Do guns protect anyone? No, they do not. The very presence of a firearm in one's house is an invitation for tragedy. The gun-owner is far more likely to see his gun used against a family member than to have that gun "protect" him or his property. And Jove help him if the local criminal element learns that he has guns in his house--for his house will soon be burglarized and the guns stolen. Keep in mind that every illegal gun starts out as a "legal" gun.
The nature of my job puts me outside among the public every day for several hours per day. I've been caught in crossfire on three different occasions. On one of those occasions I came within a few inches of being shot. The bullet whizzed past my thigh and entered the ground just in front of me. Since the shot was fired from behind me, I never even saw that the person with the weapon had a gun in hand until she fired (out of anger) at a woman standing in front of me. One time I came upon the scene of a drive-by to discover that a ten-year-old boy had been shot accidentally when he got in the way of the intended target. He didn't live.
One of my co-workers was at a local gym with his son. An outside altercation moved into the gym when one of the folk arguing began running for his life and ducked into the gym--my co-worker, playing basketball with his son, was in the way and was gunned down. He survived, but only after a lengthy period during which he had to recover from the gunshot wound (the bullet passed through his torso, gravely injuring him). Another of my co-workers was at an intersection when a man casually drew a pistol from his jacket and shot a third man standing beside my co-worker, (who hauled ass and was not injured).
If the numbers of killed and wounded in this nation were posted for any other country, one would have to conclude that said country was in the midst of a war. Even some civil wars don't produce the numbers of killed and maimed that we do in the USA with our warped and diseased affair with the mass production and mass ownership of guns.
And here's the deal:You don't have a fucking right to own a gun.
No matter what some right-wing sack of shit on the illegitimate Supreme Court might say. No matter the ravings of self-centered asswipe Libertarians, our Constitution called for a standing army, not the mass ownership of unregulated guns in the hands of any racist, spoiled rotten, criminal-minded dink who craves such.
You Nazi Rat Assholes...do us all a favor. Load your guns and turn them on yourselves like thousands of depressed, desperate people do in this nation every year. Do it right and it'll all be over in an instant. If Ernest Hemingway can do it, surely you can, too. But of course you can't be counted on for that. You're all a bunch of right wing tools, one of the plutocracy's trump cards, the pro-corporate base on which they lather the mortar. Fuck the lot of you.
