Chopped Garlic ... Of Virginia Tech ... The Right To Bear Arms ... And Barry Crimmins

First and foremost, The Garlic wants to extend our prayers and sympathy to the victims and families of those killed and injured in today's - and yet another - senseless outburst of gun violence.

There was an interesting merger this afternoon, as I watched the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the horrible tragedy that took place at Virginia Tech today.

CNN's Jack Cafferty just finished rattling off a list of school shootings, going back to the 1966 and Charles Whitman and then noted that he could not cite a single instance of such carnage being reported in other countries. Cafferty declared such shootings as uniquely American and, rhetorically asked what made that so.

Well, Jack, for one right off the top of the head, is the readily and easily accessibility of handguns in this country.

With an army of politicians, corporations, organizations and good ol', flag-waving, gun-toting, red-blooded Americans, who resist any controls or bans, they keep said guns flying off the factory production lines and into the hands of anyone that wants one.

No word if the First Lady was "discouraged" by what happened today, but earlier in the day, the Chief Decider had to weigh in and assure the base, that despite the horror and mounting death toll coming out of Virginia Tech, he still stands for the American Way, and "As far as policy, the President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed."

What a loaded line that is ... "All laws must be followed".

Then, the telephone rang and it was friend, and America's best satirist, Barry Crimmins, who was watching the same news.

Crimmins, who penned a most heart-felt letter-to-the-editor in The Boston Globe this past weekend, over the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, had written a fall-on-the-floor-laughing comedy routine back in the 1970's on gun control.

In the opening of the routine, Crimmins would announce that he was a proponent of gun control, and then, parenthetically, and remedially, explain to any NRA members in the audience, that meant he was for it.

Crimmins would go on, saying that, yes, the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution says we have the right to bear arms.

Fine. Then make it so that whoever wants to bear arms, bear arms from 200-years ago.

He would riff that it would be pretty difficult to walk into a 7-11 with a concealed musket under your coat. And, on the plus side, if you were going to commit a crime with a musket, you probably would only get off one shot before being subdued, due to the cumbersome mechanics of reloading a musket.

But Crimmins didn't just make jokes about the deadly gun violence, he also offered a sensible alternative.

Baseball Bats.

With baseball bats, he pointed out, some three-or-four-year-old, when he or she digs around in Dad's closet, pulls out a baseball bat, and, at worse, gets a lump on his or her head, rather then having a bullet blaze through it.

What a far, far better world it would be, if Crimmins' concept had been adopted.

Schools would make the national news and cable blizzards, perhaps, for the academic accomplishments of their students, not for - and yet again - setting a new standard for death by gun violence.


Links

Barry Crimmins

Barry Crimmins On The Garlic


It hasn't been your cold dead hands, Charlton, but rather thousands of innocent peoples', who've had their lives snuffed out