Our America

 Every damn day now. And every damn where.

And I am all out of words, people.

I am  out of words and outrage and shock or even surprise, because this is our country now, this is our America. It's perfectly normal for 22 people, a lot of them kids, to get shot because the Kansas City Chiefs won another Super Bowl and had a parade to celebrate. It's perfectly normal to go to school or the movies or the grocery store or church. for God's sake, even church, and not come home again because the people who could change that think "inconvenience" and "infringed upon" are the same thing.

I'm out of words for those people, except for "congratulations." You've given us the country you've always wanted us to have. You've given us a country of Thoughts and Prayers and calibration and a hefty bottom line for the gun industry, which provides you with all the proper bullet points -- bullet points, get it? -- whenever you need them.

You wanted the Wild West, you got the Wild West. Except even in the Wild West they made you surrender your shootin' irons at the city limits in some communities.

Imagine if a community tried to do that now.

Imagine the howling from the usual suspects, the caterwauling about the Second Amendment and freedom and how the Liberal Communist Socialists Are Comin' To Take Our Guns, and all the other paranoid lunacy that keeps the gun manufacturers in clover.

I'm out of words for those folks.

Let 'em say what they want in a country where it's as easy to gear up like an Army Ranger as it is to go down to the 7-Eleven for a gallon of milk. Let 'em celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace by posing the wife and kids in front of the Christmas tree brandishing military-grade weaponry. Merry Christmas from the Johnsons here at LZ-X Ray!

Let 'em say that.

Me, I'm done talkin'.

I'm done after some crazy person marched into Joel Osteen's mega-church a few days ago and started spraying rounds, pop-pop-pop-pop. I'm done after thousands of dads and moms and kiddos in their Mahomes and Kelce and Chris Jones jerseys came downtown on an unseasonably warm February day to celebrate Chiefs Kingdom, and then pop-pop-pop-pop, people screaming, people running, a young woman dead and 21 others wounded.

Eight hundred cops downtown yesterday. God knows how many Good Guys With Guns, because this was Missouri and Missouri is one of those red states where packing as much heat as you want anywhere you want has the force of law behind it.

Allegedly that makes Missouri safer. Um, guess not.

I don't own any firearms, but I grew up with a father who collected guns. I grew up with an uncle who was an avid hunter. I grew up in a gun household, grew up with the gun culture, and I understood it and didn't fear it.

This I do not understand. This I do fear. Because I hear the Second Amendment absolutists say law-abiding citizens having to jump through a hoop or two to buy a firearm is the same thing as infringing on their right to bear arms, and I wonder where we got to a place where that makes any kind of sense at all.

It's not the guns, these zealots say. It's mental illness and the absence of fathers in homes and the person wielding the gun, not the gun itself. All of this might be true, but it's also camouflage for the larger issue -- which is that these same zealots back lawmakers who keep making it easier for those persons to wield that gun. 

And I am out of words for all of it. The only thing I have left is a great weariness, and the realization that football players who just won a Super Bowl could wind up, two days later, comforting trembling children as the world went pop-pop-pop-pop around them.

That actually happened yesterday, in Kansas City, Missouri, US of A. That actually happened in Our America.

God bless it. Because at this point, I can't think of anyone else who'd want to.