One last plea

 Maybe I'm not the one who needs to keep saying this.

Maybe it's Gregg Popovich, who said it a week or so ago, who gave our idiot politicians the rough side of his tongue because their solution to This Week In Shooting People is simply to give more Americans more opportunities to shoot people. 

"More guns, more safety!" they babble, as the bodies pile up and America keeps arming itself like a military strike force.

And meanwhile there's a young black boy in Kansas City all wired up in a hospital bed because he rang the wrong doorbell by mistake.

And  there's a cheerleader in Texas (of course!) all wired up in another hospital bed because she got in the wrong car in a grocery store parking lot, again by mistake.

And there's a young woman lying cold on a slab because she and her friends turned up the wrong driveway, again by ... well, you know.

So the body count is one dead, two hospitalized because America is insane and the idiot politicians won't do a damn thing about it because they're insane, too. Not to say bought off by the fine folks in the violent death, er, gun industry,

Business is booming these days in the former, in case you haven't noticed. Someone buys a slug and very often a date with the coroner every day in Indianapolis now, and every other day or so here in the Fort. People are eating lead left and right down in Kentucky these days. And now you can't even make a honest mistake without some nutbar shooting you for it.

I mean, seriously, who greets someone on his front step with a spray of bullets? Who pulls out a piece and starts shooting because someone got the wrong car? And for God's sake what sort of batshite psycho grabs his gun and blazes away because some cars turned up his driveway?

The vehicles in question were already turning around when Psycho Boy opened fire. The hell is that?

And the worst part is, some of the aforementioned incidents happened in states that have those moronic stand-your-ground laws. Which means Psycho Boy might reasonably argue he fired in self-defense because he "felt threatened."

In fact, that's the argument his attorney was already crafting even as the authorities hauled his client away.

And now I'm remembering all the times I mistakenly started to get in the wrong car in a parking lot. Or got my addresses mixed up and knocked on the wrong door. And especially, I'm remembering the time a colleague and I were driving back from an IU-Illinois game in Champaign-Urbana and blew a tire right at the Veedersburg exit in western Indiana.

Up the ramp and into town we trudged, looking for a door to knock on. And fortunately we knocked on the right one.

 The guy who lived there loaded us into his pickup, drove us back to our car and helped us put the donut on. Wouldn't even take any money for it.

Later, I said, man, we were so lucky. That remote part of the state, it's a wonder we weren't greeted with the business end of a shotgun. 

I thought I was joking.

Turns out I wasn't.

And so, one last time: Put the guns away, people. Put. The damn. Guns away.