In USA handgun availability for everyone including those with evil intentions and personality disorders begot 429 mass shootings since 1976, with increasing frequency annually, fifteen hundred dead, and four thousand injured. Perps are mostly deranged young men; sites are split between schoolhouses and workplaces. Among 25% of population who own firearms, estimates show there are more weapons than total residents. So, damaged individuals who grip too tightly own on average 4 apiece, and taunt normal majority with putdowns including “snowflakes”, though over 80% of Americans want background checks and bans on assault rifles. There’s no end in sight as long as Republicans and Speaker of House newly appointed stonewall every attempt to limit sales of automatic and large capacity weapons. Lewiston, Maine is the latest episode with similarly eighteen dead and thirteen injured. Subsequent massacres will likely claim thousands more innocents over next decade.
For half a century of network programming, the most popular broadcasts were crime, war and western dramas that showed murders from wanton weapon use. For example, Rifleman Chuck Connors wielding his carbine gunned down at least one adversary every week. Dick Wolf’s Law & Order franchise and spinoffs constituting 1,000 hours of programming, excluding Criminal Intent and Trial by Jury but including FBI, LA, Organized Crime, Special Victims Unit, and True Crime, have someone brandishing a handgun in every episode, which heightens tension as a storytelling device. Similarly, Criminal Minds shows brutal killers and lurid felons pursued with gats in hand during every action sequence.
Video and virtual gaming that focus on killing also desensitize youth and inspire mayhem. National Institute of Health states, “Anything that promotes aggressive behavior in young children statistically is a risk factor for violent behavior in adults as well,” though direct causes can be complicated and multifaceted. Gun manufacturer’s deny scientific conclusions, while advertisers exploit childhood curiosity and teenage fears. Latest statistics show ~21,000 murders each year were gun-related, while 26,000 suicides were allegedly accomplished using guns, if you can believe investigators seemingly too busy to dive deep enough to collect valid evidence.
Anarchist author Alfred Jarry raced his 1896 Clément Luxe track bike, bought new on credit and never quite paid for, while carrying a carbine and two six-shooters, firing them as a warning to anyone in his way, as if radical bicycle bells, while scorching Parisian cobblestones and surrounding countryside. Contemporaries deemed him unstable headed to an early grave, but his plays César-Antéchrist and Ubu Roi were prescient about today’s abuses of power and corruption in government, while Le Surmâle was specifically about superheroes racing bicycles under the influence of absinthe. While several bicycle brands began as gunsmiths, some made handguns for use while bicycling.
As ugly as these situations are, they pale compared to millions who’ve died over same time in vehicular collisions, more than American COVID pandemic victims, overdoses with synthetic opioids, or soldiers in wars. Only cancers and cardiovascular diseases, both indirectly related to motoring, exceed collision carnage of this automotive anathema resulting in ~50,000 fatalities every year. Bicycling related deaths remain low, averaging 600 annually since mid-1970’s, though people constantly caution self propellers to, “Be evvver so careful,” while failing to warn to victims of over 5 million car collisions to drive safer, because trillions get transacted in support of automotive folly.
All this is naught compared to coming viral pandemics with waves of biological weapons. People worldwide are still dying from contracting COVID, HIV, and influenza despite official relaxation of prophylactic measures. Anyone with a suspicious mind might think they are being engineered to target enemies and undesirables who’ve lowered their guard based on official advice.
You can conclude that enemies full of hate surround you. Don’t be fooled into believing they are furious minions of some foreign nation far away. Villains seek to lead, and seem decent on surface until they steer state straight into tragedies. When Putin began drafting soldiers to invade Ukraine, millions of youth fled motherland. Lard and odor deplorables who abhor and ignore law and order do no one any favors.
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