Twisted environment

Well, look. I guess we're sort of on our own. Every other week, some lunatic racist bug-eyed joker is going to take his automatic weapon to a movie or a church or somewhere and gun some people down.

We are just going to have to live with it. Or try to. Could be us, you know. Anybody reading this could go to a movie or church or a mall or lunch at the wrong place at the wrong time and get killed by a lunatic with an automatic weapon.

I was thinking this morning that the Second Amendment should be enforced in what Tea Partiers call the "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In its original guarantee, the Second Amendment referred to arms as they were in 1789. The 2012 death count wouldn't be near so depressing of the lunatics had to use a muzzle-loading flintlock musket.

Good luck trying to get some congressman to sponsor that idea. It would have been so amusing, also, to view the law-abiding gun nuts who brag that they "pack," having to tote a musket into McDonald's.

But not amusing enough. We are talking random life and death here. Ask the relatives in Aurora, Colo., or Oak Creek, Wisc. Two weeks ago it could have been any one of them, writing this blog. Not knowing if it would happen to them.

The question is, in this twisted environment, how do we give ourselves the best chance to stay alive? And it is "best chance." It may not work out, and we could still get shot. But how do we give ourselves the best chance, in the United States of America, with no help at all from our local, state, or federal government, to not be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the next time?