OMG, the entire freaking organization must have lost every marble its members had in their heads! Have you heard the NRA’s hilarious proposal? Let’s post armed guards in very school across the land!
Dudes and dudettes! Have you ever really talked to a minimum-wage security guard? REALLY? Do you seriously think we’re all going to trust our kiddies to one poor little underpaid, usually undereducated, often less than richly endowed with IQ points freaking hired security guard? With a pistol? SERIOUSLY?
Best argument in favor of home-schooling I’ve heard today.
Well, you know, I am the child of a gun nut myself, and I’ll say I was mighty happy to have the old man’s Ruger in hand when a sh!thead accused of kidnapping and assault was 30 seconds from getting inside my house. But that notwithstanding, I’m not nutty enough to imagine our liberties demand that every civilian have access to semiautomatic weapons. Bring a stop, once and for all, to selling combat weapons and their knockoffs. Require background checks for wannabe gun buyers. Make it a felony to leave a gun within reach of your kids. But keep Big Brother’s hands off responsible Americans’ pistols, shotguns, and ordinary rifles.
Back to daily life, such as it is: Spent the whole week working like a horse. Nothing like “retiring” from a job to keep you busy, eh? This week Tina and I have done two books, in one way or another. A bunch of edits and a mystifying list of efforts at references came in from one client, whose project I’ve neglected shamelessly as other demands have impinged. Just as that landed on my desk, an old client called: would I index 360 pages of amazingly arcane scholarship?
Well, sure, for the fee they agreed to pay. Foisted the reference search onto Tina, who spent a good eight hours straightening that out. I knew she was actually spending that much time on it, because DropBox signals whenever somebody changes or updates files. Every time she hit “save” or altered a file, a little tab with some announcement popped up on my computer. Figuring out and adding new copy on my end, plus coordinating the rectified references with the in-text citations took a good four hours on my end. Meanwhile I had to start on the index.
This has been — always is, every year (the thing is an annual) — one of those projects that grows huger the more you work on it. Spent most of the week building that. Wonder if anyone else has been doing anything more interesting?
TB explains why on concrete layers will build a “crack” into a slab: to prevent real cracks later on!
Donna Freedman, who’s flyin’ around again, stays at her dad’s house and gets to deal with a plumbing problem…one that gives her an hours-long workout!
Money Beagle has some good advice for enjoying the Christmas season.
At Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal has already started to agonize about a health insurance decision that needs to be made by February.
Nicole&Maggie at Grumpy Rumblings ruminate(s) about crazy (and not) friends.
At My Journey to Millions, Evan talks about reasons for life insurance that might be attractive to retirees.
Planting Our Pennies describes the hassles entailed in living in an “older (1980s!!) home in Florida. Thanks goodness I live where it never rains!
At Brip-Blap, Steve suggests several ways to get free money.
Abigail at I Pick Up Pennies describes one of those brushes with entropy that seem to visit us all now and again.
Mrs. Accountability suspects extreme couponing is actually a form of hoarding.
Speaking of entropy, it’s coming on to the middle of the night, and this old bat needs to go to bed.
(P.S. Well…that was weird. After I hit “post” WordPress somehow deleted almost all the paragraph breaks in this thing. It looked fine in Preview!)
How about adding a basic psych eval to the background check, too? Pretty sure Jared Loughner wouldn’t have been able to pass one of those…
Yeah, but the problem is, Adam got the guns from his mother, who presumably could pass such a test. As I recall, those two boys who shot up their school a couple of years ago also kiped the guns from a family member.
You wouldn’t have to steal them from a relative, either. Private sales are unregulated — I’ve seen guns at yard sales! And the gun show loophole makes it ridiculously easy to get your hands on just about any kind of arms, no questions asked. Bring cash money, and you can’t be tracked down once you’re out of the building.
It’s hard to imagine what is to be done that will work. So much hardware is out there right now, much of it in decidedly questionable hands, that it seems impossible to rein it in. We might slow down legally sanctioned sales of new and used weapons, but there’s little we can do stop illegal sales or transfers of guns that don’t involve money or shipping.
Agreed, it wouldn’t solve all the problems – but I don’t know. It at least feels like a step that hopefully most people could agree is reasonable… where armed guards roaming the hallways of schools nationwide perhaps, is not something everyone can agree is unreasonable. =(
Yes. Something certainly has to be done. And armed guards of the TSA ilk do not a desirable “something” make.