The Mount Everest of Crazy, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #305 | @MDWorld
You’ve got to hand it to Ann Coulter. When we are in our deepest shock following the revelation of another repulsive act of massive, mindless horror, Ann pops out of her box to entertain us.
Of course, I’m referring to Adam Lanza’s shooting spree of last Friday, where – and the story is still unfolding – he slaughtered 20 young children, mostly kindergarteners, as well as at least a half dozen adults. He also slaughtered his mother, who lived near the Newtown, Connecticut school. Reports of deaths at his brother’s residence in Hoboken, New Jersey proved to be untrue.
In case you thought you had mommy-issues, Adam borrowed his mother’s car in order to kill her – with her own guns. He also borrowed his brother Ryan’s I.D. This is why early reports identified the shooter as Ryan Lanza; in any huge story our 24-hour news media (broadcast and Internet alike) rush to print anything they can lay their hands on and then the rest of the day make their corrections sound like breaking news.
We expect the usual knee-jerk responses: those on the left calling for stricter gun control, those on the right singing the “don’t blame the tool” song. Some say nobody should be allowed guns, others say this wouldn’t happen if everybody had guns. Well, both sides are right. And if pigs could fly we wouldn’t have to fertilize.
But Ann… wow, she ups the crazy to 12. She is the Mount Everest of crazy.
Coulter says all this wouldn’t happen if we repealed our concealed-carry laws. “Only one policy has ever been shown to deter mass murder: concealed-carry laws,” she Tweeted, along with a link to a piece she wrote in 2007 following the Virginia Tech, record-holding shootings.
Amusingly, half of the states in this nation do indeed issue concealed-carry permits… including Connecticut.
You know, Connecticut. Where Ann Coulter was raised, and from where she threatened to run for Congress. And where 27 people were shot to death.
I don’t know how many of those five-year olds actually applied for concealed-carry permits, but Ann believes they might be alive today if only they would whip it out and fire back.
There’s all kinds of crazy. There’s Michael Moore crazy, where he conveniently skims over elements that might contradict his point. There’s Todd Akin and his legitimate rape can’t make you pregnant crazy. There are the morally color-blind Ayn Rand crazies. And then there’s Ann Coulter. What she lacks in grace she makes up with her impeccable timing.
Given the fact that I live a half-hour from Newtown, it was a bit scary to watch this story evolve. But Ann used to live eight miles from me, and believe me, that was a lot more scary.
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Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com , every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check the website above for times. Gold also joins Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.
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December 17th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
Don’t be silly, Mike. We don’t have to arm the children, just the teachers…and possibly the janitors…and the kitchen staff. Okay, maybe we should arm the children who are hallway monitors.
December 17th, 2012 at 1:05 pm
Hallway monitors can lose it, too. Issue a gun at birth (or conception, whichever comes first these days) and give ‘em a Glock G21SF as soon as they can handle the recoil. Everybody gets a gun. Everybody has a gun.
It won’t take long before violence rates plummet. Along with the census numbers but, hey, if you’re gonna make an omelet you’ve got to break some eggs.
December 17th, 2012 at 5:29 pm
Ann Coulter gives stupid asshole bitches a bad name.
December 18th, 2012 at 10:14 am
According to Huckabee and Bryan Fischer and Glenn Beck and Steve Deace, the problem is that American society has become too secularized.
And according to Coulter, Louie Gohmert, Larry Pratt, the problem is that schools have two few guns.
So the solution, clearly, is more God and more Guns. Here’s and idea. Perhaps the US could have an Evangelical militia armed to the teeth, patrolling all schools and also teaching the students. Maybe they could even import some Taliban guys to teach them how to do it.
December 18th, 2012 at 10:54 am
Rene: I’m pretty sure we already have quite a few evangelical militias eager to take on the job of educating America’s youth.
December 18th, 2012 at 3:35 pm
God and Guns. Yeah, that got Obama into a bit of trouble back in 2008:
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them… it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Of course, Obama was right on the money.
As for the evangelical militias, well, Adam Lanza was home schooled for a while.
As for more guns in the school…
An 11 year old kid in Utah got busted today for bringing a gun to class – actually, on suspicion of possessing a dangerous weapon and for aggravated assault because students said he pointed the handgun at them. But the kid did say the reason he brought the gun to school was self-defense in case there was a Newtown-type invasion.
I presume Ann will be raising money for his defense.
December 19th, 2012 at 7:54 am
Here was my FB posting on the whole, “We need G-d in our schools:” To those who react to the tragedy that “We need to put G-d back in our schools:” I don’t ever remember him being there when I went to PUBLIC school. Plus, that’s the same thing the Taliban believes. And who’s G-d? Mine? Yours? The one that soul-less people such as Mike Huckabee and the Westboro Baptist Church worship? Odin? Religion belongs in houses of worship and learning belongs in schools.
The only time I remember Him in school was for the Pledge of Allegiance. And for our winter chorus concerts, we’d always have to sing some Christmas songs, although we were never told to follow that belief. Me and one of my fellow Jewboys would have our subtle protest by not singing Christ’s name.
December 20th, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Mike: I know you put it in there just for me; so I’ll respond: home schooling does not equal religious schooling. And in Lanza’s case, I think his home schooling was a result of his problematic behavior in school, not because he mother decided he wasn’t getting enough Jesus in the public classroom. I don’t know if she had any unusual religious obsessions.
December 20th, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Mike — Coulter’s a typical partisan reactionary. And partisan reactionaries always say stupid stuff because they are not actually thinking out events and issues from all logical angles. There’s an invisible logic line that they will not cross if it means criticizing their own.
By the way, about eight years ago, when I started attending the annual Alumni Professional Day at my old high school, Lane Tech, I was shurprised to see metal detectors and an armed Chicago cop ASSIGNED to the school as part of his normal beat and school security.
Even back in the days where race riots in Chicago were commonplace, the cops were never assigned to a specific high school. Guess that’s not the case anymore.
December 20th, 2012 at 5:48 pm
No, Rick, actually I didn’t. I’m opposed to home schooling not because it is often but not always done by ultra-conservative parents and not because it is often but not always done by ultra-religious parents, or by survivalists or any other separatist group. In fact, I don’t even oppose home schooling because it is often and almost always done by parents who are ultra-conservative, ultra-religious, survivalists and/or separatists. I oppose it because the kid gets a crappy one-sided education with serious holes in it depending upon which fringe group(s) the parent(s) believe in, and I oppose it because the kids do not get the vital socialization skills needed to make it in the real world and to get along with others. They barely get any of that in public school; why make it crappier?
As for Mamma Lanza… well, she knew her kid was a wacko yet she took him out shooting anyway. In her case, the chicken came home to roost.
I was at an AHL hockey game in Bridgeport last night. On the zipper that runs around the rink between the first and second decks ran the names of all of Lanza’s victims during a moment of silence that preceded the Star Spangled Banner. It was a very emotional moment, with an entire arena choking back tears. Every day we have between two and six funerals out here. Every day I see these kids’ faces in the obit column of the Norwalk Hour.
Do I blame Lanza’s actions on home schooling? Nope; as you know, I didn’t like it a week ago either and I don’t dislike it any more today. The guy was looney. I don’t blame guns, either. But I do blame his mother for teaching her little looney-tunes how to shoot.
December 20th, 2012 at 5:59 pm
Russ, you are defaming typical partisan reactionaries.
I should point out to those not blessed with a Chicago upbringing that Russ’s Lane Tech was, and still is, in a pretty “nice” neighborhood — different ethnicities than during Russ’s days, but that’s municipal evolution for you. It’s by the Chicago River and by a nice park just west of a nicely gentrified aging hipster neighborhood and a mere mile and a half from the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. It’s nowhere near the Lawndale and Englewood neighborhoods where a majority of all those murders happen and where the gangs rule with such an iron fist Hermann Göring would have clapped in admiration. Nope, it is a nice lower-middle class kinda area.
But I’ll tell you one thing. If there hadn’t been cops and security there a week ago today (Thursday), there would have been by last Monday.
December 20th, 2012 at 9:51 pm
I think security guards have become fairly common in high schools. Now I guess we’ll start seeing them in grade schools, because Ann Coulter’s — and William Bennett’s — idea of arming the teachers is a really bad idea. But since no one wants to fund education, they’ll have to fire teachers to pay for the security guards.
And I continue to think your “socialization” argument lacks merit, but we can agree to disagree.
December 21st, 2012 at 9:21 am
Bill Bennett. Wow. That means we only have six more weeks of winter.
December 21st, 2012 at 11:21 am
And the NRA finally breaks its silence:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hBlM7exHpMNRcL9w3jWQALC-KnaQ?docId=5b15699485cc4ae69d34dbc89ac239ee
December 21st, 2012 at 7:49 pm
To nobody in particular: I just realized in my previous post that there’s a Democratic narrative disconnect in my comments about Chicago and race riots.
How could there ever have been really terrible race riots and vicious racial discord in Chicago when all of the people living there were Democrats? Every good partisan Democrat will tell you that it’s the Republicans who are the racists.
I guess I’ll just have to file that under “Things that make one say, hmmmmm.”
December 22nd, 2012 at 8:10 am
Hey, Russ. Daley Democrats. Daleycrats. The generation gap between the Daleycrats and the Democratic Party was so wide they were in a different time/space continuum.
Which is why I generally voted for Republican candidates for mayor. Of course, most of them were either former Democrats or hard-core drunks. Either way…
Richard Friedman was actually a really good guy. After taking on the nearly thankless task of running against Daley in his fifth reelection campaign, Friedman was given a gig as a local HEW director. We worked closely together on a couple youth services projects in Chicago; he really cut through the bullshit like a hot knife through butter. I’ve always wondered how the city would have done under his mayoralship.
Of course, electing the first Republican mayor since the 1927 election probably would have put the media into cardiac arrest. Given that most of them were Daley tools, that, too, would have been fun.
December 22nd, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Mike — “Daley Democrats” is really a cop-out of sorts. Mayor Harold Washington was getting openly racially dissed by white Chicago aldermen in the the 1980s, And while the open racial divide among Chicago Democrats appears to be gone, the fact that the city is still probably the most racially segregated major city in America leads me to conclude that the racial divide is still there and has simply moved underground. That’s why the nonsense Democrats spew about Republicans is meaningless to independents like me. They haven’t even cleaned up their own act yet.
December 22nd, 2012 at 4:19 pm
Of course there are bigots and assholes everywhere. We tend to forget that Harold Washington was a loyal member of Daley’s party and reaped the benefits thereof, which put him on the road to becoming mayor. Black neighborhoods voted for Daley (and other Democrats) by more than 70%. There’s a reason for that: Daley, who always believed he was a liberal in part because he was the first party leader ever to put a black man on the upper part of the ticket, gave black neighborhoods the same services and, more important, the same degree of patronage as he did the white neighborhoods. There were exceptions: Daley’s own neighborhood made out better than the rest, and as everywhere else the prosperity of the neighborhood and the value of the land therein usually has an impact on how much attention the city government pays each area.
Are white Democrats as a group less annoyed by black people than white Republicans are? Well, yes, I think the history on that is pretty clear. Both groups have their share of bigots and assholes.
But I completely agree with you that the racial divide is still there and has gone underground. That has been very, very easy to do under the fog of “political correctness.” The WORD nigger is still there; now it’s usually in a thought balloon and not verbalized.
December 23rd, 2012 at 9:44 am
Chicago is a great example of why a statistical sample of one is not a statistical sample at all. Advocates of unrestricted gun ownership are fond of pointing to Chicago as “proof” that gun control doesn’t work, despite the fact that if you look at the entire country, gun violence rates are lower in states with greater levels of gun control, including…wait for it…Illinois.
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