Predicting The Unpredictable

THE BANK SHOOTER was a current employee of the bank, an unexceptional one who did not stand out as a possible killer, and nobody, including the world's best shrinks, could have possibly guessed that he would walk in one day with a rifle rather ahan briefcase and open fire at his fellow employees, killing several. A totally unexpected, unpredicted, unpredictable shooting spree, as they all are. Indeed the young was among the millions of presumed "good people" presumed by Republicans qualified to pack heat, on accounta his failure to kill anyone yet, right up until the monent when he did. He was qualified to pack heat, and therefore he should have been packing heat all the time in public, to increase his chances of stoppng a "bad guy" in the act, so say conservatives. Hell, the more good people who carry guns, the better our chances of stopping the one bad apple who cuts loose with his legally owned assault rifle, conservatives say. What they do not say is that, with millions of folks conceal - carrying, the chances of one of the carriers erupting in a shooting spree is somewhat greater than the chances of a shooter being cut down in his tracks by a good person with a gun. there are no "good" or "bad" people carrying guns. There are only people, and they are all both good and bad. The trick is to find out which is which at any given moment, a near impossibility. Actually, we had a warning this time At least a few minutes before the shoter started shooting,his mother called 911. She was frantic, said her son was on his way to the bank with a gun, but the operator kept asking irrelevant questions, time ran out, and the warning did no good.Every victim of one of our patented all American regular garden variety mass murders leaves a gaping abys sthe silence of which reverberates through societ, leaving torn families and communities. Meanwhile the G.O.P. (Ghastly obstructionist party) rock solid supportive of their twisted, unorigianl misinterpretation of the second amendment, refuses to budge, to make even incremental progress towards mitigating our national epidemic of senseless gun violence. We will only convince them to ban assault weapons over their cold hands and dead bodies, and those of many thousands more.