Sunny today. Our high was 77F. Today I put together a corrected, reformatted version of what exists so far of The Night Watchers for SubPress. That was the day's work. The afternoon's film was Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021). --- So...the shoooting in Nashville. And once again Americans are calling for politicians to do something. ANYTHING. This reaction is reasonable. This reaction is sane. It is not, though, necessarily rational, informed, or very well thought out. Sure, there are things we could do tomorrow, good things, like implementing longer waiting periods, better screening processes, and we could certainly consider making semiautomatic rifles a lot harder to get. That said, consider this: The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s trade group, publishes firearm production reports that draw on a host of sources, including the ATF, the U.S. International Trade Commission, and the Congressional Research Service. In 2020, the group reported that “the estimated total number of overall firearms in civilian possession is 433.9 million.” And from ABC: U.S. gun sales have almost doubled since the Covid-19 pandemic started, rising from an average of 1 million guns sold monthly in 2019 to nearly 2 million a month in 2020, according to data from the FBI and Small Arms Analytics, a firearms research and consulting company based in South Carolina. Sales rose sharply at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and again in June following widespread unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s killing that May. So, as of three years ago, in a country where gun sales are booming, we already had 433.9 million guns in the hands of civillians. Let that number sink in. Then think, those of you who call for even limited gun bans, how would it possibly be done? No country on earth has ever attempted anything like this, getting rid of hundreds of millions of firearms, legally owned by civilians. You make them illegal, overnight people become felons. And how would this all work? An honor program where owners voluntarily hand their guns over to authorities? A door-to-door collection carried out by the police and/or military? Is there an option I'm not thinking of? Can you not see the violence and chaos that would ensue before the attempt was finally judged a disasterous failure and abandoned? And if we ban further sales, well...there's already all those guns out there, and the ban will only make a very small difference, if it makes any difference at all. It might prevent a handful of "crimes of passion," spur of the moment situations where someone buys a gun at Walmart hours before a shooting. But for the most part, if the guns become illegal tomorrow, people will still have fairly easy access to them, and that includes the semiautomatic and automatic rifles. Illegal? Sure. But if you're planning to do that sort of damage, are you really worried about going to jail? Yes, it's that bad. And the more I think about this sort of thing, the more I think human beings are just not very good at accepting the existence of unsolvable problems (especially ones created by human beings), which I think this is. The guns are in circulation. There's no way to get them back out of circulation short of...I don't fucking know what. Something very, very, very bad. Imagine a thousand Wacos. And no, I'm sorry, but you can't look at countries where mass shootings don't happen or are rare and posit those places as proof we can ever see the same sort of nation here. Because those counries never had anything like America's gun culture, much less what may by now be somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion legal guns in circulation. And I'm just saying, before you point fingers and condemn this or that person or group, stop and think about the nightmare that would face us, trying to get rid of the guns. I promise you, it would be even scarier than what we're seeing now. It's a shitty thing. And it's going to get worse. And I can't even begin to imagine a solution, except attempts at defending the population that become ever more disturbing in their own right and ever more restrictive. Sorry. Yeah, that was a bummer. Later Tater Beans, Aunt Beast 3:54 p.m.