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Domestic terrorism, domestic politics

David Sirota of Salon.com has named yesterday's massacre in Colorado for what it is - terrorism. Our media would lead us to believe that terrorism is only the purview of dark-skinned Islamicists, but that is faulty thinking. The country is under siege and at the mercy of domestic terrorists like the Colorado murderer because we refuse to take responsibility for standing up to the NRA and passing and enforcing laws that will inhibit the gun traffic in this country. This will not change until we mature enough as a country to give up our adolescent obsession with guns and violence. Frankly, although it depresses me beyond measure to say it, I see no possibility of that happening.

Meanwhile, predictably, a certain segment of our society rushes to the microphones to say that if only there had been someone else in the audience with a gun to take the shooter down, all of this could have been avoided. Never mind that the shooter was wearing full body armor and that the hero would have had to shoot around the vast crowd that was in the audience and that was panicked by the assault and then have his bullet pierce the armor in order to take him down. All it would have taken is one Clint Eastwood type hero and he would have made the day for all of us, so goes their reasoning.

One of the proponents of that kind of thinking is our own Texas Republican Tea Party Representative and resident wackadoodle Louis Gohmert. He believes that the massacre was caused by "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs" and that if only that hero gun toter could have been in the audience, all would have been well. Gohmert was last heard from last week when he signed on to Michele Bachmann's hate campaign against Islamic Americans. And he is one of our elected representatives! Do we wonder that the country is in such trouble when we continue to elect such idiots?
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