Some Enchanted Evening

This post is about gun control. Trust me...it's about gun control, but my own thinking style runs towards the metaphoric...so I have two preliminaries for you. (and two post-liminaries.)

First Preliminary—Rodgers and Hammerstein, South Pacific, Some Enchanted Evening:

     Who can explain it, who can tell you why
     Fools give you reasons, wise men never try

Second Preliminary—A great article in Politico, entitled Why the NRA always wins. 

And the takeaways are:

• It’s not the money. It’s the culture. 
• Politics is downstream from culture.

The NRA has its own channel called NRATV. It gets good ratings in flyover country. 

It uses good-looking actors and easy-to-watch shows that portray guns as: healthy, American, moral, fun, romantic, and as necessary in the fight against terrorists, godless liberals, and all sorts of bad guys that are waiting in the bushes to kill you and your family and RAPE YOUR PUPPY!

Oh for heaven's sake...click on it...you can delete your browser history later. But really...you should click on it. You need to experience it. You need to understand that political contributions and political threats are not the greatest weapon of the gun lobby. If you clicked that link, then you are looking at the greatest weapon.

So how do we fight that? It is a fact that you don't need an assault rifle to defend your puppy...let alone 20 assault rifles. You'll be fine with just a double-barreled bird gun as Joe Biden once told us. But who listened?

The gun nuts are right (kinda)...we don't need more guns laws. This is not a political fight...it is cultural. 


We need a national campaign to directly counteract NRATV. We need something like the Truth Initiative against cigarettes...remember those horrible images of yellow teeth, black lungs, wheezing old people, and images that were far, far worse?

Turns out, they worked.

We need to dramatically portray the real effects of guns in our world. 
These are: 

• The enabling of easy suicide
• The accidents involving children
• Graphic demonstrations of what military weapons do to bodies
• The escalation of domestic disturbances and trivial disputes with neighbors
• Funerals of Law Enforcement
• Lives destroyed in prison

Legislation and logic...charts and facts...agencies and programs...we should never abandon these methods, but we gotta win it on the culture front, or we lose every time...the carnage continues...people stay awake at night trying to understand what kind of sicko would RAPE A PUPPY...then they buy an AR-15 and three high-capacity mags...and a bump stock.

First Post-liminary—Check out Scott Adams latest book: Win Bigly

And the takeaways are:

• Words are less persuasive than pictures.
• Facts are less persuasive than feelings.

Second Post-liminary

Georg Cantor proved that the rational numbers are countably infinite. (this includes rational fractions like 223/1784) 

He also proved that the irrational numbers are un-countably infinite.

It is the irrationals that form the glue that holds the number line together. They are infinitely dense on the real line. They form the continuum.

The rational numbers are the mile-markers.
The irrational numbers are the road.

Roald Dahl—A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men.