She's well-acquainted with the touch of a velvet hand like a lizard on a window-pane

And the hits just keep on comin'!  If only we were all armed 24/7 and in constant terror for our lives, these things wouldn't happen!

Here, incidentally, is the front page of today's newspaper:

The whole thing wouldn't fit in the scanner, but you get the idea.  I can't decide whether this layout was done by a horrible racist, a disgusted cynic, or someone who was just totally oblivious.  I think our gun-fetish culture is quite succinctly summed up by this actual, one-hundred-percent-real advertisement that was going around online recently:

Gun freaks get really mad when normal people point out the obvious Freudian implications of their fixation, but hey, look, the very people selling them the guns don't have any illusions about what's going on either.  It's a real catch-22: obviously, anyone to whom this ad speaks shouldn't be trusted with any weapon more dangerous than a pair of safety scissors, and anyone to whom it doesn't would be horrified at the very thought of owning such a thing.  I know I've written about how it would be necessary to make larger structural changes to really effectively combat our gun problem, but golly.  Sometimes you just can't help but be fucking disgusted.  No one more disgusting than the NRA and like-minded enablers, that's for sure.  You hear all this talk about Responsible Gun Owners,™ and I can certainly believe in the existence of such people.  However, this is manifestly obviously not a group that includes any owners of the above weapons, any cretins squealing like stuck pigs about how the gummit's gonna take ther guuunnns, or, to broaden the scope a little, any NRA members.  'Cause if there were a majority of Responsible Gun Owners™ in the NRA, they would've thrown out LaPierre and his fecal ilk, and gotten some, you know, responsible leadership.  And if there were a small minority of RGOs in the group, they have surely quit by now in disgust.  Otherwise--you know.

I don't really have a point here.  It's just that one of the features of civilization that I kinda like is not constantly having to walk around in fear that some lunatic's going to murder you, and I just hate so much the fact that we have this loud, braindead contingent of people feverishly doing their damndest to repeal this feature.  Gah.