What I am going to say about that bank shooting in Louisville may sound crazy to a lot of the people who read my blog, but what I don’t understand about how people are reacting to the killing of five employees of bank in Louisville, along with the wounding of eight other individuals, including one of the cops who rushed to the scene and exchanged fire with the shooter is this: How come everyone is so surprised?
Actually, the shooting killed six bank employees, because even though he was apparently going to lose his job at the bank, the shooter, Connor Sturgeon, was also a member of the bank’s staff when he unlimbered an AR-15 and blew the place apart.
The reason I can’t come to grips with all the anguish and despair being lavished on this latest example of a uniquely American event that we refer to as a ‘mass shooting,’ is because the shooter used his gun exactly the way his gun was supposed to be used. And not only did he use the gun properly, taking full advantage of how the AR-15 is designed, but he bought the rifle legally just a few days before he loaded it up and took it into the Old National Bank.
Why else would Connor Sturgeon walk into a gun shop and then walk out with a gun for which he may have plunked down a thousand bucks? And let’s not assume that he only bought the gun. What about some extra magazines, maybe a nice carrying case, some cleaning equipment and maybe a scope?
The bill for those other items could easily have been another couple of hundred bucks, but the kid behind the counter in the gun shop would certainly have told Connor that he needed to be totally and completely prepared.
Prepared to do what? To kill someone with an AR-15, because in case you didn’t know it, that’s what the AR-15 is designed to do.
I love how the gun industry has decided that a weapon which can shoot more than 60 rounds of military-grade ammunition in one minute is a ‘sporting’ gun. And when I use the phrase ‘military-grade ammunition,’ I am talking about ammunition which was designed to create the maximum damage when it hits the human frame.
The point is that when the World Health Organization talks about a medical threat known as violence, they don’t distinguish between ‘good’ violence and ‘bad.’ It doesn’t matter if you shoot someone else because they were attacking you or you were attacking them. Point an AR-15 at someone, pull the trigger and release a 55-grain piece of lead which exits the barrel at 3,200 feet per second, and you have committed a violent act.
And who’s to say that someone who crashes into a bank or a classroom or a movie theater and tries to kill everyone in the place is mentally ill? Since when was Connor Sturgeon diagnosed by a competent physician before or after he shot up the Old National Bank?
Of course, he was crazy. We all know that. He was so crazy that he knew how to walk into a gun shop, buy the right kind of weapon for what he wanted to do, engage the store clerk in some small talk, answer all the questions on the background-check form, take the gun home and begin to plan his big day.
Want to see how crazy people behave? Spend an hour or so on the grounds of a facility where people who can’t tell what time it is are living there because nobody in their homes can clean, dress, and feed them every day. Or check out the old guy who trudges up and down every aisle in Stop and Shop pulling every, single item off the shelves to check the price.
These people are ‘mentally ill,’ and their illness prevents from hurting anyone else. But if I get pissed off enough later today to settle a score with the scumbag who lives down the street and insulted me in some way last year, I’m not behaving like a crazy person if I load up my AR-15, go down and stand in front of his house and blast away. I’m behaving exactly the way that Cain behaved when he killed Abel in Genesis, Chapter 4.
There’s a reason why you only have to read through three chapters of the Bible to get to where we start killing each other after God put us on the Earth.
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