At least to Joe’s credit, he didn’t say that his ‘thoughts and prayers’ were with the families of the people gunned down yesterday in San Jose. Joe’s got a different slogan in response to gun violence – Enough!  Which leads me to ask a question: Enough of what?

              Way back in 1968 our friend Frank Zimring put together a report on gun violence included in an initiative by President Lyndon Johnson to study the causes of violence in the United States. Too bad ol’ Lyndon didn’t ask anyone to explain the causes of violence that we were committing at the same time in Viet Nam. Oh well, oh well.

              Zimring’s study of gun violence was published in 1969. I may be the only living person other than Frank Zimring who actually owns a copy of that report, and here’s what it says: “Times and dangers have changes from frontier days when a gun was often necessary for survival. The extent to which guns are actually useful for defensive purposes must be reappraised.” [Page 61.]

              Folks – that was written more than fifty years ago. And the appraisal has yet to take place. Or I should say, to the extent that guns are still considered useful for defensive purposes, what we are now told is that we need guns to defend ourselves against the tyranny of the government and the national state.

              Too bad the guy who killed eight people in the transit depot in San Jose had to then shoot himself at the end of his spree. Because if he were still alive, I’d really like to find out if he went on that rampage because somehow the San Jose Transit Authority represented the political tyranny which puts his Constitutional ‘rights’ at risk. Or better yet, maybe the poor bastards he gunned down were all secretly working for the Deep State.

              The loonier and crazier Gun-nut Nation becomes when they have to respond to another instance of mass slaughter perpetrated with a gun, the more I am convinced that the days when any red-blooded American patriot can simply walk into a gun store and walk out a minute later with a ‘sporting’ gun designed to end the lives of scores of men and women may be coming to an end.

              Why do I say that?

              Because on the one hand, we are the only country in the entire world which lets people settle a dispute with lethal force. It’s called ‘stand your ground,’ and no other society sanctions this kind of behavior and also allows its citizens to engage in such behavior by using a gun. The two guns that Sam Cassidy used to shoot and kill eight co-workers yesterday weren’t ‘sporting’ guns. They were semi-automatic pistols, designed to be used the way they were used in yesterday’s assault.

              On the other hand, like it or not, this country is becoming more diverse, more color-blind and more gender-heterogeneous every day. And as that happens, the attitudes which promote the kind of gun violence we witnessed yesterday in San Jose will fade away.

              The promoters of walking around with a gun for self-protection are no longer all that interested in protecting themselves against co-workers or anyone else who pisses them off. Their gun is the only way they can be ‘free’ and protected from the encroachments of the tyrannical state. Now the fact that this statist tyranny only seems to rear its ugly head when the Democrats are in power, duhhh, that’s just a nuance which should never be taken to question the monthly arrival of my social security check.

              The extraordinary racial, cultural and gender diversity of this country is the product of laws and court decisions enacted by that tyrannical, national state. And as the social dimensions of those laws continue to reverberate throughout American society, the anger about such remarkable changes will slowly but surly go away.

              As that anger and fear disappears, the guns will disappear as well.

All my gun books right here: Gun Violence | TeeTee Press.