Random Thoughts Post-Boston

Random observations, in no particular order…

Anyone can buy a pressure cooker, but the Boston bombers also killed with guns. Wonder where they got them? Internet? Gun show? As a friend of mine has noted, we demand background checks to buy Sudafed, but not guns.

The right to vote is at least as important as the right to own a firearm, but the same people who are so protective of the Constitution and the  2d Amendment seem to have no problem requiring documentation in order to vote. Yet in-person vote fraud is virtually non-existent, while gun violence perpetrated by felons and paranoids is epidemic.

Speaking of self-appointed guardians of (selective) constitutional rights, it hasn’t taken long for many of them (yes, Lindsey Graham, I’m looking at YOU) to advocate immediate retribution against the Boston bombers in defiance of both the Constitution and the rule of law. Amazing how quickly the same people who indignantly wrap themselves in the Constitution when they perceive a threat to their rights are willing to resort to mob rule when someone else’s rights are at issue.

Finally, for all you War on Terror types: the horrific attack at the Boston Marathon was treated as a crime, and the perpetrators were promptly apprehended. Random acts of carnage, whatever the motives of those responsible, are criminal acts. The perpetrators are criminals, not “warriors.”

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Words are Inadequate

We still have no answer to the questions who and why…..no way of getting our heads around the fact that some (presumably) human being or beings planned and executed a devastating, vicious attack on people they didn’t know, people who had come to Boston simply to run a marathon.

This is the horror of terrorism: it’s random. It reminds us all that life is tenuous, and that any belief that we are in control our destinies is illusory.  It reminds us–as if we had any doubt after Sandy Hook and Gabrielle Giffords and 9-11– that there are sick people in this world, people whose rage or pain or zealotry trumps their humanity.

There really aren’t any words for what most of us are feeling right now.

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