Golfing with gunfire and poetic justice

(First see last entry.)

Unlike Donald Trump — his instant fundraising email: "There are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us" — I do not know, nor does any member of the public, the true intent of the suspected assassin, emphasis on suspected. Maybe he enjoys blasting robin red breasts on refreshing Sunday afternoons. Hey it's possible.

As I wrote a Canadian friend who departed his U.S. birthplace and American madness years ago, what we do know is that the Secret Service "appears to be doing its usual bang-up job." How a man carting a lethal weapon got anywhere close to the golf course strikes me as a bit of not-so Secret incompetence. 

In 1997 our firearms-happy Supreme Court stripped the federal requirement of background checks from the 1993 Brady Law. Since then congressional Democrats have tried and almost universally failed to beef up America's insane gun laws. The major exception was the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, which applied to originally Soviet-made AK-47s. The law expired 10 years later and Republicans have blocked all efforts to revive it.

Which brings us to today's poetic justice. The apprehended, golf-course roaming suspect was packing one. A trifle overkill for blasting robin red breasts, I grant you, but in freedom-adoring America, to each his own, by law. 

I'll speculate along Trump's email line. Perhaps the country-loving gunman had simply decided to commit the runaway bane of all freedom-adoring people: voter fraud. In which case he had also decided to cast his ballot just a little too early and rather illicitly. Such instances have occurred on presidential candidates, president-elects (FDR) and sitting POTUSes, too many and too painfully to name.

I'd wager that today's maybe-shooter purchased his AK-47 after 2004, when our freedoms once again included the right to own a military weapon that no moderately intelligent hunter would have neither a need nor desire for. Its sole ontology, etiology and teleology is to kill human beings.

Donald, you can thank yourself, your calibrated Republican allies and your packed Supreme Court for insisting against all logic that assault rifles are no different from 18th-century muskets. Today will make not a dent in your gun-pandering, no doubt of that, notwithstanding that you have seen the face of poetic justice.

***

Know your killing machines.

Because it appears the sheriff's office doesn't. From late last night:

The weapon recovered by authorities was identified by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office as an “AK-47-style rifle” equipped with a scope. However, a firearms expert told The Washington Post that the gun more closely resembles an SKS-type rifle.

[Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric] Bradshaw described the weapon as an AK-style rifle. However, photos shared at a news conference Sunday appear to show an SKS-type rifle in a polymer stock, fitted with an AK-inspired magazine for 7.62mm cartridges, according to the firearms expert.

SKS-type rifles are semiautomatic weapons that chamber 7.62mm rounds, a higher caliber than is most often used by AR-style rifles. They are patterned off a design that originated in the Soviet Union in the 1940s but was soon rendered obsolete by the AK-47.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office referred questions about whether the recovered weapon had been misidentified to the FBI, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Comments

[Anne J]

Like it matters what kind of assault weapon it was. Republicans don't get to complain about a second attempt on their dear leader's life. It's their all guns everywhere all the time militancy that helped this happen twice.

And I'm sorry but I can't muster any sympathy for Trump. He advocates violence against people he doesn't like and incited horrible violence on January 6,2021 because the election didn't go his way. You keep putting that kind of evil out into the universe, don't be surprised if some of it comes back to kick you in the seat of the pants.