Ned cannot, for the life of him, understand the "mentality" of the gun crazy fraction of the adult population of this benighted country. Today comes word of some idiot who carried an M16 into a Michigan football game. On top of that, we have crazies waving firearms at political rallies, where the President is portrayed as a Nazi and worse. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. The situation seems to Ned to have gotten worse, if that is imaginable, over the past twenty years, perhaps beginning with the demonization of Bill Clinton by the Republican slime machine, which of course was picked up by media outlets more interested in fomenting controversy than any real analysis of events. Then Fox "News" entered the picture and all the 24/7 Cable Channels, with their "all hysteria, all the time" mentality.
What worries Ned is that the average person in this country is not very smart, and to Ned's way of thinking, only slightly removed from a severe form of mental illness--paranoia, psychosis, or what-have-you. In fact, this is not as hyperbolic as it may seem, since "experts" attest that around 20% of adults have some sort of mental problem at some time in their lives.
Combine this nascent paranoia/psychosis with the hysterical presentation of events by cable along with the ready availability of guns and ammo, and you have a conflagration ready to happen. Ned only wonders why it hasn't happened sooner, and then he remembers Oklahoma City, Columbine, VPI, ad nauseum, and wonders how many more of those we will have to endure before we achieve some sort of gun sanity in the US.
He is not hopeful.
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