Another Mass Shooting: Washington Navy Yard

How many times is something like this going to happen? Arguably, on into infinity, since it is apparently impossible to do anything whatsoever about guns. At all. At all. At all. No matter what, our gun fetish is so all-consuming, its place in the Constitution so somehow overriding of every other right, that nothing is ever going to change. So, this will happen over and over.

As usual, the chorus from the right that "if only there were more good guys with guns. . ." is ringing out. It's an overly simplistic, best-case-scenario, dream-world, go-to response. It doesn't take into account friendly fire, people mistaking the good guy for a bad guy, or the fact that your average Joe isn't freakin' Dirty Harry. Also as usual, if you visit Right Wing World, you'll find a hyper-defensiveness, and a readiness to assign motives that fit their world view. And odd, repurposed (and vaguely racist) insults of President Obama, stuff like, "is he going to say the shooter looks like his son?" [Story continues below]



And as usual, there will be mutterings of doing something, but after getting bupkis despite a big push after Sandy Hook, nobody will have the energy to do so. And nobody seems to have the clarity of mind to say out loud that "the answer to gun violence is more guns" is a lot like mutually assured destruction.

[Excerpt]

Washington Navy Yard shooting leaves at least 12 dead plus gunman Aaron Alexis

A former Navy reservist went on a shooting rampage Monday inside a building at the heavily secured Washington Navy Yard, firing from a balcony onto office workers in the cafeteria below, authorities and witnesses said. Twelve people were killed, plus the gunman. . .

Read more at: CBS News

 

Photo of the Week: Navy Barracks "Swastika"

Photo from source, LATimes.com

I thought the house on the freeway the other day took the cake for strange photo of the week. Nope! This is a shot of a Navy barracks, built in the late 1960s. How is it possible that this wasn't noticed in the original blueprints? Amazing.

[Excerpt]

Navy to mask Coronado's swastika-shaped barracks

CORONADO, Calif., -- The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air.

The four L-shaped buildings, constructed in the late 1960s, are part of the amphibious base at Coronado and serve as barracks for Seabees.

From the ground and from inside nearby buildings, the controversial shape cannot be seen. Nor are there any civilian or military landing patterns that provide such a view to airline passengers.

But once people began looking at satellite images from Google Earth, they started commenting about on blogs and websites about how much the buildings resembled the symbol used by the Nazis.

Read the rest at: LATimes.com