Like many of the people around the nation I was shocked and appalled at the tragic loss of lives in Aurora, Colorado. To be innocently watching a film on opening night and to be senselessly gunned down, any one of us could have been there. Like the mall shooting in Arizona, the shootings at Virginia Tech, we are struck so deeply by these tragedies because these are normal places for people to gather, they are not war zones or crime-ridden backlots, so to encounter such violence in so unexpected a place, and for it to be perpetrated by the "one lone gunman", these are things we simply cannot wrap our heads around. As I was reading the various media coverage of the movie theatre shootings, there was one site that listed Tweets that were pouring in from celebrities, as well as the people in the movie theatre and I was intrigued by some textspeak I had not encountered before: SMH. Which, if I can trust Urban Dictionary and the like, means something like "shake my head", used to express that emotion when you just can't seem to find the words and you just have to shake your head in disbelief. Words like flabbergasted or appalled would take up too many characters in a Tweet, for sure, but I think SMH encompasses so much more than those words, anyway. Mostly because if you cannot find words to express your shock, then SMH is more accurate than settling for a word, because it expresses an action. I'm not in love with textspeak, I think the ubiquitous LOL is meaningless, and I prefer to write "Ha!"-- laughing out loud does produce a sound which can be expressed in text, and Ha! has just the same amount of characters so LOL is stupid. WTF is fine, but people who start to transfer their textspeak to regular oral speech and actually say the letters "wtf" when they could just say the whole phrase are missing the whole point of the fricative nature of the F-word. If I say "eff" now I've lost the power of the "K" sound and it's wholly dissatisfying. But there's something rhythmic that works with "SMH". Like you can shake your head and say "SMH" and it conveys that same feeling of "I do not know where the logic or order of things in the world has gone but it certainly has no presence in this situation."
As an example Governor Hickenlooper of Colorado said that stricter gun laws would not have prevented James Holmes from perpetrating his massacre. Holmes with his "diabolical" mind would have come up with a way to create a bomb or something and still perpetrate this evil. Ok, I can agree that sicko minds who want to kill, will certainly use whatever means are at their disposal, Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City proved that. But if we had stricter laws regarding not only stockpiling weapons and ammunition but also purchase of explosive making products even if it is just household cleaning products, if we had a more central system monitored by the same kind of investigators and algorithms that credit card companies employ, wouldn't that serve to at least get authorities a headstart? I mean why is it possible for Mastercard to call me the moment my credit card is used in a strange way "Were you in Pennsylvania this afternoon ma'am because your credit card was used there and in New Jersey almost at the same time?" Or when my grandmother, 92 at the time, started to book a trip to Italy, the credit card company was on such alert that they shut her card off until they spoke with her. But there isn't a system whereby any kind of alert goes off when a person buys an assault weapon? And why are civilians allowed to have automatic, multi-round weapons? I'm quite sure that "the right to bear arms" did not translate to "the right to have any equipment the military uses" as I don't imagine the founding fathers meant it would be just fine for you to have a cannon in your front yard. Ok, so all that has made me SMH for a long time, because I really think the smart minds in our country can come up with a system whereby local authorities might get some kind of little alert that a PhD neuroscience student had just ordered 1000's of rounds of ammunition on the internet. I don't want to live in a police state where the government is privy to all my purchases, but seriously, ordering ammunition over the internet? SMH.
Further in the SMH department, however, was the news that applications for gun permits shot up across the nation following the Aurora massacre. Now, I can admire the vigilante mentality that if one good guy had just had his gun on him, there would have been less people killed in the movie theatre. This good guy would have taken out the gunman immediately. Right? Probably not, because there would have been a good ol' shoot-out in a crowded gas-filled room and now Good Guy with his legal concealed weapon quite likely would have hit some innocent bystander in his zeal to get the shooter who was wearing kevlar anyway so Good Guy's little pistol would have had little to no effect. I need only say "Trayvon Martin" and the magnitude of the lack of logic of getting guns into the hands of more "upstanding" citizens for our nation to feel safer should be cause for a little SMH-ing.
The logic that more guns on the street is safe for anyone is frightening. The logic that any non-military individual should have need for an automatic assault rifle is mind-boggling. The fact that any individual, crazy or not, can order 1000s of rounds of ammunition over the internet and no kind of alert kicks in to local authorities seems unconscionable. Would stricter gun laws stop crazies from carrying out acts of mass murder, maybe not. The intelligent diabolical mind is never thwarted by things like laws either of government or laws of logic or humanity. However, if you look at the death rate by guns in this country and that in Japan (where citizens cannot legally have any weapons, not even Samurai swords) it doesn't take a master statistician to figure out, that more guns equal more gun deaths. SMH.
As an example Governor Hickenlooper of Colorado said that stricter gun laws would not have prevented James Holmes from perpetrating his massacre. Holmes with his "diabolical" mind would have come up with a way to create a bomb or something and still perpetrate this evil. Ok, I can agree that sicko minds who want to kill, will certainly use whatever means are at their disposal, Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City proved that. But if we had stricter laws regarding not only stockpiling weapons and ammunition but also purchase of explosive making products even if it is just household cleaning products, if we had a more central system monitored by the same kind of investigators and algorithms that credit card companies employ, wouldn't that serve to at least get authorities a headstart? I mean why is it possible for Mastercard to call me the moment my credit card is used in a strange way "Were you in Pennsylvania this afternoon ma'am because your credit card was used there and in New Jersey almost at the same time?" Or when my grandmother, 92 at the time, started to book a trip to Italy, the credit card company was on such alert that they shut her card off until they spoke with her. But there isn't a system whereby any kind of alert goes off when a person buys an assault weapon? And why are civilians allowed to have automatic, multi-round weapons? I'm quite sure that "the right to bear arms" did not translate to "the right to have any equipment the military uses" as I don't imagine the founding fathers meant it would be just fine for you to have a cannon in your front yard. Ok, so all that has made me SMH for a long time, because I really think the smart minds in our country can come up with a system whereby local authorities might get some kind of little alert that a PhD neuroscience student had just ordered 1000's of rounds of ammunition on the internet. I don't want to live in a police state where the government is privy to all my purchases, but seriously, ordering ammunition over the internet? SMH.
Further in the SMH department, however, was the news that applications for gun permits shot up across the nation following the Aurora massacre. Now, I can admire the vigilante mentality that if one good guy had just had his gun on him, there would have been less people killed in the movie theatre. This good guy would have taken out the gunman immediately. Right? Probably not, because there would have been a good ol' shoot-out in a crowded gas-filled room and now Good Guy with his legal concealed weapon quite likely would have hit some innocent bystander in his zeal to get the shooter who was wearing kevlar anyway so Good Guy's little pistol would have had little to no effect. I need only say "Trayvon Martin" and the magnitude of the lack of logic of getting guns into the hands of more "upstanding" citizens for our nation to feel safer should be cause for a little SMH-ing.
The logic that more guns on the street is safe for anyone is frightening. The logic that any non-military individual should have need for an automatic assault rifle is mind-boggling. The fact that any individual, crazy or not, can order 1000s of rounds of ammunition over the internet and no kind of alert kicks in to local authorities seems unconscionable. Would stricter gun laws stop crazies from carrying out acts of mass murder, maybe not. The intelligent diabolical mind is never thwarted by things like laws either of government or laws of logic or humanity. However, if you look at the death rate by guns in this country and that in Japan (where citizens cannot legally have any weapons, not even Samurai swords) it doesn't take a master statistician to figure out, that more guns equal more gun deaths. SMH.
1 comment:
Well said, Leslie.
Post a Comment