I was but a mere tyke in a low-tier Catholic grade school in 1989 when the bats broke loose from Joseph Wesbecker’s belfry as he entered the belly of Standard-Gravure in Louisville with a duffel bag fat with over 1,000 rounds of ammo and an array of peace-makers, hunting utensils and home defense mechanisms, leading him to ruthlessly kill eight of his fellow employees and damaging the bodies and souls of 12 more, and I’ll tell ya’, it permanently colored me bad on a lot of aspects in regards to the gun ... like dude, what went so wonky with Wesbecker to transform him into the sloppiest lookin’ “Rolling Thunder” wanna-be this side of Patrick Purdy?
Was his life really so crap that he snapped? I don’t know, I can’t figure it! But I’ve never been able to look at a gun owner with complete trust since I first heard the news about those Wesbecker blues ... Eighty people were murdered last year in this oomph-heavy city, and that’s 63 by way of the gun and 31 more by “other means,” and when I say other means, my peoples, I mean by ways so horrifically gruesome the details are best kept out of a family publication such as this because I’m not trying to ruin Ed Neary’s dinner by putting a bad taste in his mouth before he even sits down to nosh. Violence makes me pause, stops me in my tracks and smacks me with ponder. It makes me worry about the violence that lurks in you, and makes me terrified of the violence slithering around in me because it’s there, baby!
You know it, I know it, hell, we all know it, so how do we keep it in check, collared and encased in carbonite until the end of our days? How do we round this bulging and hella’ sickening murder rate down to a nice flat zero sum. I’m talking about straight up zilch?! ( Hey dumb-dumb reading this trite while you wait for your Tinder match ta’ hit ya’ back: I’m actually asking you, because my love, I have not a clue) I don’t even know where to fuckin’ begin! Because I keep seeing folks lumbering around this wild-weather city in jorts and busted-up L.A. Gears with a .38 Taurus snub ridin’ that hip, and my mule-kicked brain hee-haws profusely “Like come on people! Have at least a pinch of Mrs. Dash’s Class! Because holy mother of mad-villainy! Even that sloppy, coarse, practitioner of brute force Popeye Doyle had the decency to keep his firearm strapped to his ankle and snuggly hidden under his coffee-stained slacks, and he’s no gentleman!”
Why in all the plastic-plagued ocean are suburban mommies and daddies walking around armed to the teeth and ready to side-grip that heat in a moment’s notice? Get a hold of yourselves and put that shit away! I wanna see your shootin’-iron sharing waist space with your fanny-pack while I’m stuffing my face at Bunz about as much as I want to see your raw genitals pressed against a bay window, which is to say I don’t want to see that shit at all! It’s el mucho gross-o, hombre! And it makes me take you about as seriously as a rain-coated flasher on a snowy day. Years ago, I witnessed a grown-ass man throw a temper tantrum the size of Operation Buster in my once beloved pizza parlor haunt, Queenie’s, all because his spaghetti hadn’t been cooked to al dente. Fast forward that same situation but a new location to 15 odd years later in what is our weirdly weaponized age of today, and there’s no doubt in my mind that that old fool would be waving a pistol, picking targets and making graves!
We’ve got a bunch of thin-skinned goons, whose fragile masculinity has sprung more leaks then Apollo 13, wanting to mill around the Republican National Convention packing heat! They want guns in schools, on cruise ships, inside of nail salons and atop of Chuck-E-fucking-Cheese’s by way of crow-nesting good ol’ boy’s with sniper rifles, Jesus! And for what: Our protection? Yo, Al Bundy-turned-weekend-Rambo — you can keep your wack’ protection because I’m more leery of a 42-year-old divorcé with a Ford Mustang-size chip on his shoulder — who shoots his goo any time he gets to caress an assault rifle that is one rubber stamp away from being graded military — than all of the terrorists combined in whatever country that I’ve never even heard of before ... because on the realz’, how are you gonna keep the peace when you can’t even keep your cool?
