Where we live now

 In the country where we live now, a college campus (North Carolina) gets locked down twice in two weeks because some meathead decided to show up on campus packing heat.

In the country where we live now, news organizations in American cities have a new feature: Shooting Of The Day.

In the country where we live now, in one of the cities referenced above, players and spectators at a high school football game flee the field when they hear what they think is gunfire -- only to have police discover it was merely homecoming fireworks.

That happened last night in Indianapolis, at Ben Davis High School. The fact everyone there immediately thought gunfire when they heard some loud bangs speaks volumes about where Indianapolis is as a city, where every city is as a city, where we are as a country.

Fireworks used to just sound like fireworks. Now they sound like gunfire, because gunfire has become the musical score of  too many daily lives in America. It's a musical score as familiar to us now as the theme from "Star Wars", and what it too often precedes is blood and maiming and heartache and funerals, so many damn funerals.

In the country where we live now, some people think this is just America being America. Some people think the Second Amendment guarantees it, that what some people would call anarchy is merely freedom, that the country we live in now is the country our founders envisioned.

And woe betide anyone who disagrees.

The governor of New Mexico, Michelle Grisham, did just that recently, and now she is paying the price for her heresy. Disgusted by a spate of recent shootings in Albuquerque,  she declared a public health emergency and imposed a temporary ban on carrying firearms within the city.

Well, that got the Second Amendment zealots going, of course. They declared that she was violating the Second Amendment scriptures about the right to bear arms. The usual  usual political suspects called her a dictator, shouted tyranny, hollered that she should resign or be removed from office or, I don't know, clapped in irons or something. They falsely accused her of banning gun ownership, although she didn't; her ban merely said you couldn't carry them on the street for a certain period of time.

Eventually a federal judge got involved and issued a restraining order. And so yesterday, Grisham backed down and amended her ban, restricting firearms carry only in public parks and playgrounds.

The zealots won't like that, either, of course. But it makes their argument that she grossly overstepped a bit harder to make.

And you know what?

She probably did overstep initially, at least from a legal standpoint. But not because she's a dictator or her administration tyrannical or any of the other overheated rhetoric coming from the usual suspects.

Sounds more to me like she was fed up with the country where we live now. Sounds to me like she had had it up to here with Shootings Of The Day, and regular lockdowns on our college campuses, and fireworks being mistaken for gunfire at a high school football game because gunfire is where the mind just naturally goes now in calibrated America.

In the country where we live now, you're insane if you're not right there with her at this point. And if you think the answer is more calibration, not less.