Michael Moore, Where Are You When We Need You?

     Remember toward the end of Bowling for Columbine when Michael Moore and several of the victims of the Columbine shooting lobbied for K-Mart to cease their sale of bullets? We need him to do this to Wal-Mart and to tell them to cease the sale of ammunition and guns.
     As a result of the Newtown massacre in which 20 children aged 6 and 7 were killed as well as eight adults, Wal-Mart pulled the sale of the .223 M4 Bushmaster (aka the AR 15), the same gun that murdered most of if not all those people. That was a good start but Wal-Mart still sells many other rifles (including these lethal semi-auto jobs), shotguns and sidearms plus a full complement of ammunition. This article by The Nation was an eye-opener for me. I never realized that, as a result of them ramping up gun sales a few years ago, that Wally World is now the #1 retailer of firearms and ammunition in the country.
     Wal-Mart has absolutely no intention of actually kinking a huge revenue stream for them, which is why they pulled only the AR15 Bushmaster while leaving so many attractive alternatives in their inventory throughout nearly 4000 stores. And it's fallacious to assume that the .223 Bushmaster has been involved in so many high profile mass murders and spree killings over the last decade while absolving Wal-Mart, the leading ammunition and arms dealer in the country, of any responsibility for its immense popularity.
     The "AR" in AR 15, in case you don't know, stands for "Assault Rifle." It's made to be used in urban pacification and combat situations (such as when you see a suspicious black teenager carrying junk food). It's useless even for hunting, since semi-autos for many years have been banned for that purpose.
     And, while Wally World's very marginal efforts at decorum and political correctness are to be lauded, it ought to be mentioned whatever they don't sell, Melvin's Gun Emporium and his competitors will be more than happy to step into the breach and pick up the slack.
     "Gun control." Let's all repeat it enough times, especially to our elected officials, until it actually becomes a reality. Because other nations have noticed how fucked up our priorities are. And it's getting awfully embarrassing having to explain to other nations why we allow people to buy up to $100,000 or more of ammunition, plus an arsenal of four dozen guns while the rest of us have to sign federal documents (even online) when we want to buy pseudoephedrine, which is rationed out to us at 3.6 grams a day just in case we're operating meth labs (through, believe it or not, an amendment of the USA PATRIOT Act, which places no such prohibitions on the sale of firearms, ammunition or to whom. The federal government is also prohibited from tracking the sale of arms. Stick that in your breach and fire it for the 4th of July.).