Omaha

So now it comes to Omaha. A "big city" as Nebraska goes, more crowded states would call it medium sized. I know nothing about Omaha, I drove through it and was told that it's against the law to eat while driving. A 19 year old kid with a rifle seems to have wanted to "go out in style". So he went to the gun free mall with a rifle and started blowing people away.

So now it begins. If we had no guns! If ordinary shoppers had guns! It's because Bush was there!

I grew up around guns. The most common thing in the world was to see a boy, or boys, on bikes with .22s, riding out to plink or hunt small game. Other times of the year it was fish poles or (usually single shot) shotguns. Kids in rural areas brought their guns to school and hunted their way home. High schools had rifle teams.

Nobody shot down crowds of people. What has changed? It isn't the guns, we had guns.Nor was it semi automatic weapons, we had those too. Find a copy of The American Rifleman from before the 1968 Gun Control Act went into effect and price those little M1 Carbines, with 30 round mags. Or M1 Garands. Available by mail with no records in most places. Nobody shot down crowds of people.

Today they'd call out the SWAT Teams if anyone saw three boys riding through town with rifles, and Animal Control because of the dog runnin' alongside. Back then, it was nothing and we didn't shoot crowds of people. Can we PLEASE stop yapping about guns, pro or con and look at what else has changed since I was a boy? We had guns, we didn't shoot crowds of people. Now too many of us do. The guns didn't change, something else did.

The destruction of the family? The ending of spanking? That self esteem nonsense the schools are pushing? The war against masculinity? The war against Christianity? Something is causing this and we are talking about guns.

Well the guns aren't going away. We could pass a law tomorrow making guns illegal, everywhere like in most of Britain. Anybody notice that violent crime, including gun crime, has gone up over there since they passed that law?

People ought to be able to do some Christmas shopping without being blown away. And after we look at that, my Momma used to go to the Dept. Store, leave me in the book section or the toy section, shop and then come get me. Nobody worried. As a matter of fact other parents did the same thing. How come that can't happen these days. Oh, now Linda Lou leaves me in the book section but you can bet that my daughter doesn't leave William. What has changed?

Update: 12/06/07 I must not have been as clear as I try to be. AWTM mentions, in comments, other mass murders in Nebraska. I know about Charlie Starkweather, heck I know about Killin' Jim Miller and Tom Horn, John Wesley Hardin and lots of others who ran up a very large butcher's bill back in the day.

They, however didn't run that bill up all at once. And THAT is different. Teresa, of Technicalities fame, says it's the 24 hour news cycle, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and the rest of them. I dunno, back in John Wesley Hardin's day we only had newspapers but John Wesley was certainly famous back then. Far more famous than this kid in Nebraska.

Teresa is partially right, though, these kids want to be famous. And yet I can't remember the names of those losers in Columbine, what kind of fame is that? I remember Lee Harvey Oswald, I do not know the name of that guy in the University of Texas tower. I know I could find it in a matter of minutes now and back before I had this box I would have had to go to the Public Library. Charles Whitman. I wonder if the DIs in Parris Island and San Diego still tell the Boots about Oswald and Whitman when they issue the rifles? By the way, Oswald did it, it wasn't even very good shooting. Oswald only qualified at the very bottom of the pile, a feller that had been a really good shot would have had three different bodies in the morgue in fewer seconds. But I digress.

There have been killers among us since Cain couldn't get along with his brother, Abel. But it was only in 1966 when we started having these all at once murders and, after Whitman, it was a long time until the next one.

Oh, and I blame AlGore for Omaha. If Algore would have kept his fat mouth shut about Glow-ball Worming it would have been hot enough up there in Omaha that the kid wouldn't have been able to hide that AK under his clothes. In a Texas summer it is hard to hide an S&W Chief's Special.