First to Blame

America is an exceptional country. The root of "exceptional" is "except". For example: in no nation on Earth EXCEPT the United States can a mentally ill person buy an automatic handgun with an extended clip without breaking a single law.

Here's another: in no nation on Earth EXCEPT the United States would society blame the freedom of speech for massacres committed with legally purchased guns.

The massacre in Tucson drew forth the inevitable platitudes, the appropriately somber faces, the childish gestures masquerading as introspection. The general lesson learned by the people in power has been that we should be more polite to each other.

A mentally ill manchild shoots 20 people in 30 seconds with a legally purchased gun, and the response of our "leaders" is that if only cable news hosts weren't so animated, this might not have happened.

The idea that words cause gun massacres is one of the most profound abdications of common sense I have ever witnessed. The most passing and glancing knowledge of human nature, which most people attain by the age of 12, tells us that occasional and sometimes violent disagreements are the price of admission to the human species.

People fight. People get drunk. People make bad decisions. It takes 1 second to pull a trigger. I takes a trillion years to atone for that.

Any honest person will think of the moment they've been the most angry. That one point in your life (or maybe there have been several) when you were just ready to KILL a motherfucker. Think of that moment. And then think where your life would be right now if you had been holding a gun in that moment.

And you don't have to be a bad person to have had that thought; it's simply human nature. We all get there from time to time.

Sometimes, the words of others can stir these violent and vengeful feelings. But in no other nation EXCEPT the United States can an angry man safely and surely secure a gun.

Our problem in this nation is not that we are free to say inflammatory things on television. Our problem is that we insist that our constitutionally-given freedom to bear arms is as sacrosanct as our God-given freedom of speech. And that is simply psychotic.

Speech is impossible to regulate, and only a human-hating and God-hating tyrant would even attempt to do so. Guns, on the other hand, are made by people. As such, people can regulate them. And all people do. EXCEPT Americans.

Americans, apparently, would rather blame God for their own sins. They won't blame their guns. So they blame their tongues.