Thursday, April 26, 2018

Upon Which We Build

Emo Phillips used to do a bit about how disappointed he was when he finally met his mother's friend whom she described as a "cat person." Just a normal person who happened to own a lot of cats? No fangs? Not even whiskers?
I have had a similar reaction many times to the restaurant chain called The Waffle House. If the construction was waffle based, or at least emulated waffles in some way, I would be more impressed. Maybe using maple syrup for caulking. Instead they exist as prefab roadside stops for carbohydrates and lots of coffee.
Perhaps this explains why a half-naked man chose to shoot one up in Tennessee over the weekend. He killed four and wounded two others in Antioch, just outside Nashville. His weapon of choice was the ever-popular killing machine, the AR-15. After another brave customer was able to wrestle the gunman's rifle away from him, he shed his only remaining piece of clothing, a green jacket, and ran off into the early morning.
Takeaways: The hero in this exchange, James Shaw Jr., was unarmed. He had only a mixture of courage and fear to drive him. A good guy without a gun. The crazy guy who started the trouble with his assault weapon had been previously identified as having mental problems. He did nothing to diminish that assertion over the weekend. He was still able to get his hands on an AR-15. Authorities took his gun permit away. Then his dad gave him his gun back.
More defense will be raised about blaming the gun rather than the nutjob with the gun. If this was a guy who, in May 2016 in a parking lot in Illinois and at the time his family told authorities he was having "delusions" involving Taylor Swift and believed the singer was stalking him and harassing him, I would suggest he not be allowed to have access to a stapler, let alone a semi-automatic rifle. This wasn't a school. This was a Waffle House. Will patrons have to pass through metal detectors to sit down to their hash browns and pecan waffles? Will they be asked to carry only clear bags in and out? 
To preserve the freedoms of our Second Amendment? 
That's as crazy as building a house out of waffles. 

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