Come and sing a Simple Song of Freedumb

The land of the free home of the brave, etc is locked-down in some national mourning after its latest shooting outrage. There isn't a week goes by without some remarkable shooting happening somewhere in America, but last week's blasting of some 27 six-year-olds and their teachers was a little outside the mundane 'domestics' or aggravated mall shoot-ups.

So now the nation is engaged, again, in the "debate" about the right to bear arms, or what kind of arms are appropriate for bearing. The Liberals are calling for bans ranging from guns, period, to extended magazines on military-style assault weapons. The 'sensible' Americans are claiming that if everybody, everywhere was armed, none of these killings would be happening as evil-doers with guns would be overwhelmed by the righteous fusillade of defensive fire should they have the temerity to even look like they were getting ready to 'unload'.

Even the mourning has taken on national characteristic - flowers and stuffed toys piled into future garbage heaps, sorrowful pols and first responders, fire tracks and police cars, protected funeral corteges and armed guards providing 'security'. There is also the concomittant 'beating the news to death' in every organ of media and punditry. And the steady stream of mis-, dis- and un- information that often lives in reverse proportion to its lack of accuracy. All building to a crescendo of .... nothing.

Switch to the next story.

"Mayan Cosmology for Dummeez" - or bleeding Syria - or the menace that is Iran.

And after the funerals and memorials and weeping 'heads' on TV, the nation will retire to the Mall, or the 'secure room', to await the next bullet-riddled onslaught - brought courtesy of the greatest gun culture on earth. Thank goodness it isn't as bad as Central America or the Caribbean, though. 'Those people' are real killers.

As an update to this story which now looks like it 'belongs to the ages', come the tale of how world class South African athlete Oscar Pistorius got a little paranoid and blew away his model girlfriend.

Yeah he was devastated by what he'd done - it being an accident and everything. But he's suffering from something most Americans could buy into and that a fear of crime. Seems virtually all South Africans - or at least the 'real' South Africans who can afford weapons live in a bunker-state, worse than Israel - in fear of the horror that stalks by night. They all know that the criminal South Aftricans who come to get them come armed with murder as the end game. And so it was last Valentine's Dy Eve when Pistorius arose to close a door and heard a noise in his 'rape-door' equipped bathroom. Terrified enough to not notice he was sleeping alone all-if-a-sudden (those king-sized beds will do that if you're not slumbering up alonside a 'hippo'), he claims to have shouted a warning and then - even more frightened opened-up with a fusillade of shots through that unopenable door. He was a good shot nailing his bff four time including a 'good 'un'' to the head. Later on, on discovering her 'missing' from bed, he realized it might have been her who failed to respond to his pre-shoot warnings. He then best down the impregnable door with a cricket bat and applied first, and in her case, last aid.

Aren't we glad we don't live in South Africa either?