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" As it happens, I&amp;#039;m sitting in a hotel room a few exits east up I84 from the town of Newtown in Connecticut, where a crazy man named Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered 26 people including 21 children. In the immediate aftermath, it was decided by elite opinion leaders that the country had reached a Teachable Moment in its insane attachment to its firearms. And this is what we&amp;#039;ve learned -- people are coming to get our guns and we must buy more and better and bigger guns and carry them everywhere so that we can fight off the gun-grabbers and the insane people who we still must allow to have guns because the Second Amendment has no exception for insane people and therefore freedom. That&amp;#039;s what we&amp;#039;ve learned. And, in the past couple of days, we&amp;#039;ve had a school shooting in New Mexico, the killing of a man in a movie theater for the crime of texting his daughter, and a Republican group in Oregon which thought the best way to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln was to raffle off a rifle. I mean, why not? Only one of those two guys was murdered with one. There is one thing all of these three events have in common, in addition to tragic stupidity. There is in all three of them a fundamental undercurrent of contempt by the gun lobby and its financiers and the politicians that they sublet at every level of government for anyone who is revolted by the damage they have done to society. The power of the arms industry in our politics is brute and unyielding. Its lack of compassion is made of iron and its ability to make itself the victim nearly inexhaustible. Witness, for example, the Republicans of Multinomah County.  In celebrating these two men, and the denial of the rights they fought so hard against, the Multnomah County Republican Party announces that we have started our third raffle for an AR-15 rifle (or handgun of the winner&amp;#039;s choice). The drawing will be held at our Lincoln Day Dinneron February 15th, 2014. Tickets are once again $10 a piece, or 12 for $100, and there is a hard cap of 500 tickets in the raffle. Multnomah County GOP Chairman Jeff Reynolds said, &amp;quot;We are here to reaffirm our strong defense of the Second Amendment and the right to personal protection. The Bill of Rights is inviolable, despite what the gun-grabbers in Salem might try.&amp;quot; They know how inappropriate this is. They fking revel in how inappropriate this is. The whole damn point is to be inappropriate, to dr happenedagoon the rest of us into their paranoid fantasies, and to make us complicit in their own contempt for us. Witness, for example, what happened in the movie theater in Florida. The theater has a policy of not allowing weapons in the auditorium, Molly McFerran, a spokeswoman for the theater told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. There are signs on the walls with drawings of guns and knives with a heavy red slash. There are no metal detectors or searches, she said. The situation began on Monday afternoon as about 25 people were waiting for the 1:20 p.m. start of the movie at the Grove 16 Theater. Oulson and his wife in one row and Reeves and his wife in the row behind. Oulson began noisily texting his daughter and Reeves asked him several times to stop, Charles Cummings, who was siting nearby, told reporters at a televised news conference Monday. Voices began to rise in anger. &amp;quot;Somebody throws popcorn. I&amp;#039;m not sure who threw the popcorn. And then bang, he was shot,&amp;quot; said Cummings, a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, who wanted to see the movie as a birthday treat. His son, Alex, came along. The sign doesn&amp;#039;t matter. The theater&amp;#039;s policy doesn&amp;#039;t matter. What matters is that we must confound the phantom grabbers of the guns and carry our piece everywhere. The victim must fall on us and bleed because only then are we truly a free people. The rest of us exist only to catch the dead and dying. Witness, for example, what happened in New Mexico, which runs so true to form for such things that it&amp;#039;s almost a relief that it&amp;#039;s only another school shooting, and not some guy killed in the crowded theater because he pissed off a guy who was so dedicated to exercising his Second Amendment rights.  Two children were taken to a hospital after a report of a shooting at Berrendo Middle School in Roswell, New Mexico, a spokeswoman for the hospital said Tuesday. They were taken to Eastern New Mexico Medical Center, where their conditions were not immediately available, she said. The state Department of Public Safety said in a news release that state and local police were called to the school at 8:11 a.m. and that &amp;quot;there are preliminary reports of injury,&amp;quot; though their number and extent were not immediately known. Injuries. No deaths. That&amp;#039;s what passes for good news. Nothing is ever enough. Nothing is ever sufficient. Nothing is ever a large enough killing ground for us to stand up against the power on the other side and point out, forcefully and permanently, that it is crazy to allow concealed weapons to be carried everywhere, and that the policy proposals of the people who have lost sons and daughters are valid and worthy of serious consideration, and not the contempt of manicured butchers who get fat on death. There is a deep fog over the highway now, and Newtown is far from sight. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26739/gun-shootings-011414/>