1. Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Running shooting thread 2023

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Slacker, Jan 3, 2023.

  1. WriteThinking

    WriteThinking Well-Known Member

    You're not getting that prayer is action -- the action usually offered first, before any other, if at all. And, so far, they are in lieu of any other action, too.

    Why question it, or pooh-pooh it in connection with something that needs all the help, interest and action it can get? It isn't necessary, and frankly, seems beneath anyone hoping to effectively tackle such an important, moral issue as what to do about mass shootings/guns. Like, yeah, let's make that Line No. 1 in a memo/statement about the problem.:rolleyes:

    You think people who might offer thoughts and prayers want a solution even, or any, less than people who wouldn't do so? I'd think not.

    That's it from me on this subject, on this thread. Offer up something else if you got anything and you don't like thoughts and prayers.
     
    jr/shotglass and Azrael like this.
  2. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    Legislative change.

    Lots of thoughts and prayers since Columbine. And yet more gun deaths than ever.

    Makes you wonder to whom all those folks are praying.

    https://www.nybooks.com/online/2012/12/15/our-moloch/

    Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:

    First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood
    Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
    Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
    Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
    To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)

    Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).

    The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

    Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

    Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol’s teeth. The White House spokesman invokes the silence of traditional in religious ceremony. “It is not the time” to question Moloch. No time is right for showing disrespect for Moloch.

    The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. How do we worship it? Let us count the ways:

    1. It has the power to destroy the reasoning process. It forbids making logical connections. We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism. Thus do we deny global warming, or evolution, or biblical errancy. Reason is helpless before such abject faith.

    2. It has the power to turn all our politicians as a class into invertebrate and mute attendants at the shrine. None dare suggest that Moloch can in any way be reined in without being denounced by the pope of this religion, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, as trying to destroy Moloch, to take away all guns. They whimper and say they never entertained such heresy. Many flourish their guns while campaigning, or boast that they have themselves hunted “varmints.” Better that the children die or their lives be blasted than that a politician should risk an election against the dread sentence of NRA excommunication.

    3. It has the power to distort our constitutional thinking. It says that the right to “bear arms,” a military term, gives anyone, anywhere in our country, the power to mow down civilians with military weapons. Even the Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any every madman can indulge his “religion” of slaughter. Moloch brooks no dissent, even from the highest court in the land.

    Though LaPierre is the pope of this religion, its most successful Peter the Hermit, preaching the crusade for Moloch, was Charlton Heston, a symbol of the Americanism of loving guns. I have often thought that we should raise a statue of Heston at each of the many sites of multiple murders around our land. We would soon have armies of statues, whole droves of Heston acolytes standing sentry at the shrines of Moloch dotting the landscape. Molochism is the one religion that can never be separated from the state. The state itself bows down to Moloch, and protects the sacrifices made to him. So let us celebrate the falling bodies and rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.
     
    Last edited: Feb 16, 2023
    FileNotFound likes this.
  3. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

  4. Twirling Time

    Twirling Time Well-Known Member

    "Moloch" in German is a colloquialism for a motor vehicle tunnel.
     
  5. Della9250

    Della9250 Well-Known Member

  6. melock

    melock Well-Known Member

    So two percent of that town’s population just got murdered.
     
  7. swingline

    swingline Well-Known Member

    I’m so glad guns aren’t a problem here in the good ol’ US of A.
     
  8. Regan MacNeil

    Regan MacNeil Well-Known Member

    Richard Dale Crum. That is definitely the name of a mass shooter.
     
  9. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

  10. Della9250

    Della9250 Well-Known Member

  11. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

  12. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    TigerVols likes this.
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page