"That is absolutely disgusting"

You go, Mike Brown. Put your heart out there on your sleeve and let it speak.

Maybe you didn't see this the other night, after Brown's Sacramento Kings opened the NBA season. Likely he'll get the usual "Stick to sports" and "What does a basketball coach know about anything" in response, as if politicians wearing AR-15 pins on their lapels and regurgitating gun lobby bullet points know anything more.

To hell with that. Everything Mike Brown said the other night about what was happening again in America was true. Straight from the heart and true.

Another crazy person, this time in Lewiston, Me., going on a killing spree at a bowling alley and a bar? And not just any crazy person, but a crazy person with military training lugging a military-grade weapon?

And so another 18 or so dead, another 14 or so wounded, and two more ordinary American places turned into combat zones. And more blah-blah-blahing, more empty words,  the new Speaker of the House -- a right-wing extremist named Mike Johnson -- saying the problem is not military-grade weaponry too easily getting into the wrong hands, but "the human heart."

Well. Last I knew, the human heart couldn't pull a trigger. It can guide the hands that do, but without those hands and without the ordinance they cradle, all those dead and wounded in Maine wouldn't be dead and wounded today.

It's absolutely disgusting, as Brown said. It's sad, as he also said. And it goes on and on without letup, as he also said, because no one does a damn thing to try to slow it down.

I mean, it's the human heart doing it all by its lonesome, right?

And, yes, that's a snide and cynical thing to say. But I've got nothing else at this point. Like Mike Brown I am disgusted and weary and sick to death of the killing, of families mourning loved ones simply because they decided to go to school or a movie theater or church or the grocery store -- or a bowling alley or a bar.

We get the country we deserve, I say, every time some crazy person ups the body count. And clearly we live in a country now that considers periodic slaughters the price we have to pay for a constitutional amendment that was never intended to mean what the more fringe elements have decided it means.

So there will be Thoughts and Prayers and the usual hand-wringing and excuse-making from the gun nuts in Washington, who seem to have gotten the idea Moses brought the Second Amendment down from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets. Who seem to think you can't take any steps to make it more difficult to identify and hamper other prospective slaughterers without desecrating the Sacred Second.

And so this slaughterer will join the pantheon, and more innocents will die, and the vigil candles will gutter out at the blood-soaked sites of our latest carnage. And, as Mike Brown said the other night, nothing will happen except the next Slaughter of the Month or Week or Season.

And the usual suspects in Washington?

They'll proudly keep wearing their AR-15 pins, even as AR-15s and their ilk continue to mow down the citizenry. Some of them, incredibly, will pose with that weaponry on their Christmas cards. And they'll continue to tell us that a nation with more concealed and open carry laws than ever will be safer if only more people buy more guns.

Yes, it's disgusting. And consider this my disgusted surrender. We get the country we deserve, as I said. So be it.

I just have one question.

With more people buying more guns, and mass shootings now just a regular American thing in spite of that, when exactly do we get safer?