They’re coming to take me away

Okay. Let’s see if I can do this.

Two days before the American gun control bill was introduced for voting, an attack was made by [then] unknown individuals on civilians at the Boston Marathon, arguably one of the biggest, most well-known marathons in North America. For days, in fear, people re-enact a version of the scene from “The Jerk” wherein Navin deduces that a psychopath shooter hates cans (a brilliant bit of movie making, for the record).

Fear does strange things to a person, and being faced with attempted mass murder does funny things to people. So it’s no wonder that organisers of marathons all across the US and Canada were suddenly reassuring their constituents and the media that their events would be safe, and would go ahead as planned. Because the first conclusion it’s natural to jump to is that whoever bombed the Boston Marathon hates marathons. And who wouldn’t really? They’re dirty, nasty things with unreal political ambitions and a strange proclivity for intestinal …oh. That isn’t marathons at all. I don’t know what I was thinking of there, but it wasn’t marathons.

Cue the United States military, police, and para-military operatives going into high gear and ignoring civil liberty in the name of public safety. Of course they had to ensure public safety. How many thousand officers were needed to find and arrest one kid? Lots, that’s how many. They shut down an entire city. This is terrifying. Personally, I find the actions of the police, the FBI, and the military far more frightening than the idea that a couple of disenfranchised kids got their hands on a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook and, broken as they were, decided to wreak havoc at a massive public gathering. It’s awful that they murdered people. It’s amazing more people weren’t killed. But don’t for a minute think that the death of an 8-year-old kid is any worse or any better than the death of a 20-something man. Whether that man was a participant of the marathon or whether that man was a suspect in the bombing itself. It doesn’t make murder any more morally “right” when it’s done in the name of one law versus in the name of illness.

[Also, what in the blue fuck does “ethnic Chechen student” mean, Reuters? Has the word “ethnic” now come to mean “anyone who is not white, Christian, and American by birth”? You know what? I don’t even know why I ask anymore. I don’t. Even. Know.]

But. Can’t get sidetracked here.

Leading up to the vote on gun control legislation, there’s a bunch of madness happening all along the eastern seaboard. People are terrified. People are getting riled up. And we all know the best time to vote on something incendiary is when we’re all already riled up.

So the US government fails to pass pretty common-sense gun control legislation, despite the bill receiving a majority of the votes in its favour. Despite it being popular, according to recent polls, with the majority of Americans. Well-placed dollars on behalf of the anti-gun-control faction did their job. It’s not worth speculating how many of the people who voted against the gun control bill would also be perfectly happy to completely dispense with their civil liberties the way the majority of Boston was.

Within a couple of days, a couple of disenfranchised kids managed to decimate the city of Boston and American civil liberty, using an assault weapon that he probably bought *perfectly legally*, and by detonating homemade bombs. Too bad it wasn’t more difficult for a mentally ill young man to get his hands on assault weapons. REGARDLESS of his ‘ethnicity’. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. Maybe the weapons he used WEREN’T acquired legally. Probably it wasn’t very difficult though, when you can *order assault weapons online*.

That isn’t even the point, though. The point is that right around the time lawmakers were voting down gun registration, TEXAS EXPLODED. Okay, well, it didn’t actually explode. But a fertilizer plant did. A fire of unknown cause at a fertilizer plant in a small Texas town called West caused the anhydrous ammonia tanks to explode with the force of an atom bomb. It registered as a geological event. People nearly 60 miles away felt the blast. That’s huge.

And it happened at nearly the same time as the gun control bill was overturned. Don’t you see? Using the same logic we used in the Boston case, wherein we deduced that the bombers hated marathons, we can, without a doubt, conclude that God hates people who vote against common sense gun control legislation.

We can also deduce, with a fair amount of certainty, that the kids who bombed the Boston marathon were clearly and obviously NOT white, Christian, American citizens. They HAVE to be ‘other’. And we can also deduce that because they chose to attack a public event close to the time legislators were voting on gun control that the people who voted against gun control were somehow in cahoots with these kids, because that distraction provided every American senator who wasn’t yet convinced that Americans NEED easy access to assault weapons with an excuse to vote against the bill that would make it more difficult for Americans who want guns to get guns so that they can protect their homes and their families against terrorists.

Now the news reporters are saying that the FBI “didn’t see [the Boston Marathon Bombings] coming”; that the elder of the two suspects had been questioned previously by the FBI (and it’s suggested that was done at the request of the Russian government) for allegedly having ties to militant hate groups. But they found no evidence of it. And, if you believe the spin of the media, that is the fault of civil liberties. Because the FBI had to call off their investigation when they didn’t find anything. Which, of course, when you think about it, means that if the FBI had been allowed to continue to investigate the young man without cause, they might have found something.

Here lies the conspiracy theory – the bit about God making West, Texas explode because He was pissed off about the gun legislation thing. It makes about the same amount of sense as a) assuming the people who attacked Boston did so because they hated marathons; b) voting against gun legislation because it should be easier to get guns to protect yourself against people who have easy access to guns.

Also, let me just say that I’m ashamed of the news media. Stop this stupid ‘first past the gate’ style of “reporting” (it isn’t reporting, btw. It’s rumour mongering and gossip unless you have verifiable facts) and try to get to the ‘verifiable facts’ style of news. I don’t care what the people who buy all of the advertising on your station say, it oughtn’t be about ratings and who gets to break the story. It ought to be about who has the most correct, and verifiable facts. Pretend you’re scientists for a while.