Was It the Opening Shot of UnCivil War?
"Gun Enthusiast With Popular Online Videos Is Shot to Death in Georgia." It was in the New York Times, Friday, Jan 11, 2013, page A17, Keith Ratliff, 32 years old, from Carnesville. He posted videos to the web which usually ended with something blowing up. An expert gunsmith, he had three and a half million subscribers, 500 million views. Police found him dead in his office on January 3, shot once in the head, execution style.
But not by one of his own guns. Someone with a gun had come in from outside and put a bullet in his head. (The 800-pound gorilla is getting harder and harder to ignore.)
Was it someone maddened by personal loss, enraged by the NRA’s heartless refusal to acknowledge reality, driven by grief, rage, and obsession with revenge? You want 2nd Amendment rights? I’ll give you 2nd Amendment rights. A bullet in the brain.
No one with a grain of sanity would actually do it. God forbid! But violence breeds violence, madness, madness. Tiny bodies in child-sized coffins, pictures of mass innocents slain, videos of funerals, loved ones in despair over lives blasted away, society wounded, savagery spreading from medulla oblongata—the primitive lizard brain—into hearts, arms, trigger fingers.
Good Guy Keith Ratliff, surrounded by guns until a baddie came in and knocked him off. Are copycats checking over their Glocks and Bushmasters? Is the NRA stepping up security in its glistening glass NRA headquarters? Has it installed metal detectors, opened a “Check Your Guns Here” counter in the lobby? Or is Wayne LaPierre daring to follow his advice to the nation by adding armed guards, giving guns to secretaries, computer operators, maintenance crews, advertising for retired cops and military, offering sign-up bonuses to ex-Army Rangers and Navy Seals? Has the opening shot of the UnCivil War been fired?
"Gun Enthusiast With Popular Online Videos Is Shot to Death in Georgia." It was in the New York Times, Friday, Jan 11, 2013, page A17, Keith Ratliff, 32 years old, from Carnesville. He posted videos to the web which usually ended with something blowing up. An expert gunsmith, he had three and a half million subscribers, 500 million views. Police found him dead in his office on January 3, shot once in the head, execution style.
But not by one of his own guns. Someone with a gun had come in from outside and put a bullet in his head. (The 800-pound gorilla is getting harder and harder to ignore.)
Was it someone maddened by personal loss, enraged by the NRA’s heartless refusal to acknowledge reality, driven by grief, rage, and obsession with revenge? You want 2nd Amendment rights? I’ll give you 2nd Amendment rights. A bullet in the brain.
No one with a grain of sanity would actually do it. God forbid! But violence breeds violence, madness, madness. Tiny bodies in child-sized coffins, pictures of mass innocents slain, videos of funerals, loved ones in despair over lives blasted away, society wounded, savagery spreading from medulla oblongata—the primitive lizard brain—into hearts, arms, trigger fingers.
Good Guy Keith Ratliff, surrounded by guns until a baddie came in and knocked him off. Are copycats checking over their Glocks and Bushmasters? Is the NRA stepping up security in its glistening glass NRA headquarters? Has it installed metal detectors, opened a “Check Your Guns Here” counter in the lobby? Or is Wayne LaPierre daring to follow his advice to the nation by adding armed guards, giving guns to secretaries, computer operators, maintenance crews, advertising for retired cops and military, offering sign-up bonuses to ex-Army Rangers and Navy Seals? Has the opening shot of the UnCivil War been fired?
RSS Feed