At the Mercy of Idiots 1 -- Shooters

The greatest tragedy of modern American life has to be the extent to which all who are capable of as little as writing and maybe also speaking in complete sentences that make sense are at the mercy of the idiots among us. This is because with each passing day, it seems that these holdbacks are more and more in the majority, or at least they have the tightest grip on the cojones of the majority.

For example, take the gun nuts and the wildfires that had been devastating Colorado this summer, especially in and around Colorado Springs, the home, if I'm remembering correctly, of the glorious triumph of rock arrangement called the "Garden of the Gods."

People who have been combating the fires have been saying that a fair number were started by target shooters. Unlike bullets with jackets made of other metals, such as copper and lead, it seems that steel-jacketed bullets bring about a shower of flame-inducing sparks whenever they hit rocks. When taking a stand on things I go by logic more than by anything else, and that seems perfectly logical to me. Also, not satisfied with empty whiskey bottles and beer cans, the shooters sometimes use explosive targets that, when hit, spray the immediate area with stuff that quickly enough can set afire dead, dry debris on the forest and brushland floors.

As you might expect, two things then happen.

One is that instead of following the logic of those warnings and saving their shooting for rainier, snowier, and safer days, the shooters instead loudly continue to assert their right to do their shooting wherever and whenever they please, while wheeling up their big cannon of unreason that all such proponents of harmful causes use, namely that there is no real evidence that these things that they so love to do actually have such dire results, or at least in such quantity.

The second thing is that the shooters bring up the Second Amendment, and so in effect they're saying that by so modifying the U.S. Constitution, the writers of that guiding document gave the gun-obsessed people permission to set fires to their neighbors' property and homes and to Mother Nature's great good works in general, two and a half centuries later.

In that light, it's been pointed out as being too bad that all the homes lost in the Colorado wild fires could not have been confined to being those owned by members of the National Rifle Association.

I wouldn't go so far as to think that, even though it can't be denied that that idea has a logic that has a certain attractiveness of its own, if we lived in a world in which concepts like "just deserts" and "fairness" were more than being merely just some words and nothing else.