Tuesday, December 30, 2008

WTF?

Need to diverge from the 'fun' for this post.
So I have a favorite watering hole in this frozen burg where I live. This town is very small, very isolated. With a population that is very judgemental.... intolerant even. So here is this bar, small, but with a pretty diverse crowd for this town. A fairly wide range of ages. Decent (jukebox) music. Cheap drinks. Friendly bouncers and competent bartenders.

So last Friday some jerknut goes into my bar and puts four .22 slugs into some guys neck. The victim was with a former girlfriend of the jerknut. He wasn't even the next boyfriend. He was like several iterations back. He was subdued with no other victims, and handed over to the police. Expectation is he'll get 15-plus years in jail. He is in his mid-twenties.

I understand there are senseless assaults all over the place... even in harmless or pleasant places (gang shooting at the Washington Zoo anyone?). I get that a bar is often a scene for a passion attack or killing. But this guy? In this place? There were dozens of witnesses. He had no chance of getting out. He didn't try to kill himself... which, considering he will spend the best years of his life, his get-a-new-girlfriend years, in jail... would probably have been the best thing he could do for himself.

Pretty clear why the girl was no longer with the perpetrator. Ugh. The victim will live but I understand he's had to be induced into coma for the extensive throat and spinal surgeries needed.

Thinking about this I feel this might be some sort of consequence of our politically-correct mollycoddling society. Yes. Gun availability is an issue. But this crazy unthinking guy would have done this with a screwdriver or a kitchen knife. Is this a guy who has been raised in an environment where every point of view is just a-okay, and consequences just have no teeth? Much of today's youth and young adults have just been enabled to the gills. In the interest of empowering them the educators, parents, and authorities have spawned a generation of tyrants. The kids believe everything and anything is their due, and anything should be within their grasp for any amount of effort shown. 'Where the fuck is my A for effort?'. And doing something wrong just means a time out or a talking to.

Guess what dipshit? You do get a timeout for shooting some dude in the neck. Fifteen years of time out.

This guy just seemed to have no thought about consequences. Give me all the claptrap you want about violence on television and in video games. Rant away on lack of gun control laws. How do those things obviate the fact that this lunatic pushed aside an axiom of society, 'kill or injure someone-- you go to jail', that everyone, EVERYONE knows? And when I say 'lunatic' I mean it in the most derogatory, as opposed to clinical, way. This guy HAD a girlfriend. He doesn't appear to be a schizophrenic living in an altered reality. Depressed probably. Suffering clinical depression? I'll go along with that. But he didn't live in a bubble where the voices inside his head shut out the basic demands of a law-abiding society.

Town's small enough to where I've only been here a few years and I'm only a few degrees of separation from the victim. I'm friends with his roommate's Mom. Cripes.

The bar didn't pat him down. It wasn't that kind of place. Now it probably will be. IF the owner doesn't decide he needs to install metal detectors at the door. This is the first time this has happened there, but in this pig-headed community if he doesn't make some kind of grandiose display of 'fixing the problem' his customers will probably desert him. There's been fights and some levels of violence displayed at this place, but this will be the topper.... or so one would hope.

In an eerie but gratifying parallel, there was another 'assault' in recent days with a decidedly different ending. Apparently a 44-year-old Dad's baby was making too much noise for the downstairs neighbor. After yelling quite a bit the neighbor went upstairs to threaten the Dad on his doorstep.

With a gun.

The difference here is the Dad (apparently trained in Kajukenbo?) found his moment disarmed the guy and beat him bloody with his own weapon.

Now. I'm not really favoring the Dad who can't figure out the right, fatherly, way to get his kid to quiet down, but sometimes babies are just like that. Colic happens. Whatever. But the neighbor deserved to eat the butt of his own gun for pulling it out over something that stupid.

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