I don't have anything particularly wise or insightful to say about the on-air shooting deaths Wednesday of two Virginia broadcasters, nor do I know where this is going. But I know I couldn't let it pass without mention or at least paying homage to reporter Allison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward by name. So, bear with me, I'm just going to type.
The fact that the shooting was live on-air certainly makes it more ghastly. But it doesn't make them any more dead. They'd have been just as dead if the murderer had done it any other time. Guns work that way.
And yes, clearly, I knew when I started typing that guns would have to get mentioned. And no, it's not too early to bring it up. That's what was used to kill them. You can't not mention it. And anyone who thinks it shouldn't be mentioned yet usually means that they don't want it mentioned ever. And when they say, "It isn't the time to discuss gun control," the only proper response is the one that's always the proper response -- "You're right, the time to discuss gun control would have been before this happened."
I'm not sure how many dead people it takes to be counted as a "mass shooting." It certainly wasn't nearly as many as the church shooting in Charleston, or Columbine, or at Sandy Hook Elementary School, or Virginia Tech, or New Orleans, or pick your mass-shooting, but two people can qualify as a mass. I was going to include the attack at the movie theater in Nashville, but then I remembered that the man there used a hatchet and pepper spray, not a gun. So it doesn't count. It also doesn't count because none of the intended victims were, in fact, killed.
It doesn't really matter, of course. Because it does qualify as yet another ghastly murder. Whether one person or a mass. Whether high-profile and attention-getting, or alone in a back alley or private home. And at some point, you just hope that the humanity of those who can act to address it will feel pummeled enough to do so. And yes, the corporate-owned NRA terrorist group, determined to frighten those susceptible to being frightened will come up with all manner of cold, heartless, unsupportable flim-flam explanations why their corporate interests should be protected and pour millions of their corporate dollars into supporting their cries of terror and fear-mongering, under the faux-banner of the 2nd Amendment which we ALL know and accept does all for limitations on weaponry. But enough already. Again. Human beings are dying in ghastly, mass numbers unnecessarily -- again and again -- and our freedom is not being protected one iota by the corporate efforts of the NRA. The only thing they're protecting is bloody corporate profits.
Oh, and one last thing. If it turns out that indeed the killer was fired from his job and he was crazy angry about it -- it seems like they made the right decision. It's just heart-sickening that it had the end result that it did.
So, I guess that's where my thoughts about this led.
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To read more from Robert J. Elisberg about this or many other matters both large and tidbit small, see Elisberg Industries.