Photo by Samuel Isaacs
Guns.com had a bad day and a complaint about it September 28, which that website headlined “California Governor Signs 10 Anti-Gun Laws, Calls It Gun Safety.” One of these laws – horrors! – requires gun owners to take a four-hour class. Given that tens of thousands of serious shootings, many causing death, occurred in California from 2016 to 2021 and were all ACCIDENTAL, I’d say that yeah, a four-hour gun safety class requirement sounds like an act of sanity.
Meanwhile, on the mass shooting front, things have not been quiet since, oh, say, late July. That was when nine separate mass shootings killed nine people and injured 60 across the U.S. over one weekend. Per ABC News July 20, they occurred in “Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona, Tennessee and two in Minnesota…one occurred in a parking lot of Waffle House in Newark, Delaware, while others unfolded during a party at an Oklahoma City restaurant, outside an event center in Minneapolis, and in a park in Jackson, Tennessee.”
But that doesn’t mean Americans haven’t been blasting away at each other like there’s no tomorrow since then, oh no. On October 10 some deranged person shot and killed a police officer in my hometown of West Philly and riddled the body of another officer with 12 bullets, while in Eerie Pennsylvania the same day a demented gunman shot and killed family members – eight people including children and a pregnant woman, before shooting himself to death. On September 27, Macon-Bibb County, Georgia featured a late-night shooting that wounded 12 teenagers, two critically. The same day in Detroit a man shot three people dead and wounded four “at an illegal after-hours establishment,” according to Click on Detroit WDIV Local 4 News. In fact, per Facebook, “the last weekend of September 2026 has been marred by bloodshed with 32 people killed in three separate shootings.”
Just so you don’t think guns are strictly a trigger-happy American problem, two mass shootings left 28 dead in South Africa September 29. So gun ownership doesn’t just lead to massacres here in the U.S. It’s a global problem. Wherever the citizenry is armed, it’s busy killing each other. But as Second Amendment fanatics race to point out: where the citizenry is unarmed, it’s at the mercy of an armed state. That may be true enough and any other arguments may amount to gobbledygook, but given this clear divide, there IS a compromise: it’s called gun control. I know no one in their right mind would suggest gun control to this white house or this supreme court, but I mention gun control for those of future generations who survive mass shootings in their elementary schools.
That means laws that require training to avoid accidents, licensing to purchase guns and regulations that prohibit psychotics and those with violent histories from owning firearms, thus ensuring that the citizenry can defend itself, against, say, homicidal ICE agents, and other criminals, without people shooting each other at the drop of a hat. Retarded absolutists who insist on no regs for gun ownership and blatantly open carry condemn school children to execution at the hands of lunatics with semi-automatic weapons, period. There’s no way around it. Second Amendment absolutism sans reasonable gun control restraints means five-year-olds will huddle in their locked-down classroom waiting to be shot. And either you want to stop that, or you don’t (looking at you, Supremes).
According to WBALTV Baltimore October 1, “while 2026 has had record-low homicide numbers, the same decline has not been observed in mass shootings,” to wit, there have been 343 such slaughters in the U.S. so far this year. Meanwhile roughly “465 young children,” per AI “(ages 0-11) have been killed or injured by gunfire in the United States,” so far in 2026. Everytown for Gun Safety support fund estimates that “3 million children in the U.S. are exposed to shootings per year,” while “there were at least 83 incidents of gunfire on school grounds” in 2026 “resulting in 27 deaths and 47 injuries.” According to an org called Giffords, one in four unintentional gun deaths kill a child under age 18 “with the risk highest for children between 11 and 15 years old, or under 5.”
So America’s steady blood libations at Moloch’s altar continue, with the blessing of Donald “NRA” Trump and a supreme court determined to let this repellent sacrifice rip. Not one of these Washington bigwigs could find his way out of a paper bag on the gun control issue, and while it’s too facile to say these big shot malefactors are in the pocket of the NRA, I wouldn’t discount that. But they may also believe the hokum, egged on in their insanity by publications like the NRA’s Armed Citizen News, which posted a story October 2 on a gun owner’s heroic shooting of an intruder. Now no one in the U.S. would dare argue that homeowners lack the right to protect themselves with firearms from criminals breaking and entering, so the purpose of stories like this is clearly just to boost the image of gun-toting householders – as opposed to those who leave their guns locked or don’t own them, so their kids can’t accidentally blow their own brains out.
Not to sound fatalistic, but on this whole matter the prognosis for us Amuricans ain’t great. Back in June, in Wolford v Lopez, the supreme court expanded public-carry protections, basically nixing Hawaii’s laws against it “on public-access, private property” per AI. In another ruling, these great minds “unanimously decided that prohibiting casual drug users from owning firearms” was a no-no (God protect us from birdbrains on the bench). And just expect things to get worse, because next up are state semi-automatic rifle bans. “The court will evaluate whether bans on AR-15s and similar semi-automatic rifles violate the Second Amendment.” For those of us who regarded the federal semi-automatic weapons ban as a rare stroke of congressional reason, these upcoming cases, Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, are setting off alarm bells. First off, why congress ever let the federal ban lapse is a mystery: it did nothing but good. Secondly, this bench of Neanderthals will likely sweep away the few remaining restraints.
On October 3, a 12-year-old girl was shot to death in Baltimore, NBC News reported. This killing occurred as a result of a parking dispute. That, incontrovertibly, is what it means to have a citizenry on whom there are no firearm restraints: little mundane spats over parking spaces explode into deadly fusillades. Two strangers disagree over whose car got there first and hey! They got guns and testosterone at the ready. And what does our morally vermiculated supreme court have to say about this? Let the killers carry their guns out in the open. By the way, three other people were injured in this incident, “when gunfire erupted amid an apparent dispute over parking…Police Commissioner Richard Worley said the two gunmen were being sought.” So there were at least two guns in this altercation.
“What we know is that there was some type of argument between two cowards and of course they both opened fire on each other.” “Of course,” says the police commissioner. Of course, because it’s so common. Of course, because promiscuous access to guns renders Americans routinely homicidal. The little girl was shot and killed in the crossfire, but “Baltimore police said…a 25-year-old woman and two men…were also struck.”
The Baltimore mayor referred to the two shooters as “so-called men.” Well, that’s all very nice, yes, we know these killers are despicable creeps who don’t deserve to be called men, but we also know they shouldn’t have been armed, because if they hadn’t been, that child would still be alive. So insulting them, even accurately, accomplishes nothing. What about the so-called men on the supreme court and in the white house who enable this criminality? They created these dark circumstances. And dark is the word. What else can you call a social arrangement in which small children are routinely gunned down over a parking space or because some psychopath, never properly medicated, has the supposedly God-given right to purchase a weapon of war and hears voices telling him there are demons in the local elementary school? That obscenity, that so-called arrangement is enough to make you puke. Too bad it isn’t doing that in Washington.
