For a couple of days I’ve been trying to figure out how to howl… in print - - in response to the “Uzi Accident is Fatal” newspaper headline on Wednesday.  I know how to do it with guttural outrage, head tilted back, one part scream, one part anguish, the third part disbelief. How do I give written expression to the combination of incredulity first (I must have heard/read wrong), followed by shock and horror on learning it wasn’t a cruel joke created to mock the NRA but real absurd senseless death… then the who? Where?  Why…Why…Why?  Not a nine-year-old! Surely they got that part wrong! …teaching a nine-year-old girl to handle and shoot an uzi, a gun specifically designed for no other purpose than to fire a stream of deadly bullets to kill a group of people.  What I really want to do is howl in the face of NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre and the president of the NRA Jim Porter.  I want to demand of both those apparently at least stupid if not deliberately immoral fuckers how in hell being allowed legally to buy and own and use (and teach a child to use) a gun specifically designed to kill a bunch of people all in one sustained pressure on the trigger is a reasonable representation of Second Amendment freedom. 

O.K.,  O.K., I think I’ve got it…how to howl in print… but not the why of an Arizona killing of a gun range instructor by a child being taught to use an uzi… I can do the howling….but the questions… No!  I can’t come up with even one satisfy answer.

Why would any citizen, any voter in my country insist that the Second Amendment even suggests, let along requires government approval of ownership of guns specifically designed to kill people… lots of people at a go?  What is that about?  

…And what suggestions do LaPierre and Porter have for the parents, unbelievably irresponsible as they are, of the nine-year-old girl who killed a man to help her manage the trauma of having… killed a man.  To keep myself from starting to howl all over again, I have to stop short of allowing my imagination even to picture that moment of the killing… and the long tortured life ahead for a nine-year-old.