I thought a good guy with a gun was supposed to be able to stop a bad guy with a gun. It turns out that 19 good guys with a gun can’t even stop one bad guy with a gun. 

The response of the Uvalde police department — which can only be described as pathetic — will be the subject of a federal investigation. If police departments could be sued for negligence, this one would go out of business.

Then we have the NRA, which held its annual convention in Denver only a week after the April 20, 1999 Columbine massacre in Littleton, a suburb of Denver. This time, the NRA is holding their convention in Houston — which they haven’t held for the previous two years because of Covid —

only three days after the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde.

Ah, NRA, your timing is impeccable.

The NRA is a mess. There are charges of corruption so severe that the New York Attorney General is trying to decertify the whole organization.

But that’s a story for another day.

NRA apologists will tell you that the problem is not the guns, but it’s all about mental health.

Bullshit.

Yes, we have serious mental health problems in this country, especially in our young adult population, but psychology has not yet been able to identify which of the thousands upon thousands of dysfunctional young men — and it’s almost exclusively men — will turn out to be shooters, and which ones won’t. Thankfully, an almost infinitesimal minority turn out to be shooters.

In addition, this is an almost exclusively American problem. Don’t they have kids with mental health issues in Canada or Europe? 

For Christ’s sake, even Mexico — Mexico! — which has plenty of guns in the wrong hands, doesn’t have this problem.

NRA apologists will tell you that you can’t legislate against evil.

Maybe so. 

But there are things you can legislate. Here are a few to start:

1. Ban military-style assault weapons.
2. Require universal background checks for all gun sales.
3. Close gun sale loopholes and require background checks on all commercial gun sales.
4. Remove the prohibition on gun violence research by the CDC.
5. Ban bump stocks and limit the size of ammunition clips.
6. Pass an Extreme Risk Protection Order Act, a “red flag” bill, to allow relatives and law enforcement to temporarily remove firearms from an individual in crisis.
7. Require gun owners to be insured, just like car owners.
8. Remove the liability protections of gun manufacturers, requiring them to install safety measures.

Heck, if you’re like me, you still can’t open up half your food or pharmaceutical packages. Why? Because of the Tylenol scare from 1982.

Nineteeneightyfuckingtwo.

That’s why we still have tamper-resistant packaging on almost all our products.

How many people died in 1982.

Seven people.

Seven.

How many have been killed by guns since 1982? 

While exact statistics are hard to come by — there is no national database for this — a good estimate is about 1,640,000.

Yup. One million sixhundredandfortyfuckingthousand.

But no, we can’t do nothing about guns.