Keeping Guns Out of the Fair

THE TEXAS STATE FAIR was either held recently, is being held now,or will be held soon, here in the harvest season. I recall the movie "State Fair" when I was a little kid more than sixty years ago, a big, long movie at the drive in theatre with my mother.I couldn't've een more than eight, nine, or ten. I loved the movie,for some reason... "Our state fair is a great state fair, dont miss it, dont even be late"..... the movie was about the Texas sate fair, and the human drama within. I don't recall any guns. But, back then, in the fifties and sixties, guns were not quite the gargantuan issue they are today. Chances are that when that movie was made, Texas and America had far fewer gun regulations, and far fewer guns, at a state fair, or anywnere else. The gun population in America has exploded over the last few decades; Aemrica has become obsessed with firearms. Now, damned near everyone in Texas has a gun, it seems, and folks carry openly, and all across America's fruited plain, the epidemic of gun violence continues to escalate, amid a national gun policy dominated by the conservative pro gun agenda, which, for all appearances, is a miserable failure. In the great blood red Republican state of Texas, a this year's state fair, there will be no guns, other than those carried by duly authorized police oficers. The attending public may not carry, by law. This decision by the state government, despite far right wing gun fanatic governor Greg Abbott and a state legislature owned and controlled by Republicans, the NRA, and their billionaire benefactors. In the state which thinks its a country, and has over its history constantly emphasized its independence and willingress and readyness and ableness to secede, somethng has gotten into the water supply, and made the right wing gun fanatics realize, at long last, that, after all, it would be safer to prohibit guns in a huge, packed crowd, instead of encouraging everyone to carry them, as is normal. Texas culture, by nature, generally subsribes to the insane NRA philosophy that if, in any given big crowd, all or most of the attendees carry guns that, in the event of a mass murderer opening fire, there will, magically, according to statistical laws, be at least one "good guy" with a gun nearby, who will, of course, put a quick stop to the mass murder, by murdering the mass murderer. There is, as a lady Texan and gun expert sadly expressed,simply no evidence that the "everyone with a gun prevents violence" theory actually works. None at all. Yes, perhaps a time or two a citizen hero has put a stop to a mass murder in a crowd filled with gun toting gun owners, good guys. More often, though, in a crowd stocked with people packing heat, random gun fights break out, between good guys, strangers who bump into each other or stare at each other a bit too long. Or whatever. Among humans, it doesnt take much. Like my grandfather is alleged to have said: "you put a gun in a man's hand, the first thing he wants to do is use it". That may or may not be true, but it certainly sounds reasonable. If the rate of gun violence keeps up, eventually America may reliaze that arming every good citizen is not all its cracked up to be, that bad citizens are hidden deep in all good ones, and that guns may not kill people, but they sure dont seem to mind helping.