What to say?

Here we go again.  Another nut case spreading death and destruction in celebration of his right to keep and bear arms.

So the pundits will haul out their old arguments and buff them up with the current front-page news.  The lad who did all the murder and suicide was evidently using perfectly legal weapons.  It wouldn't be especially relevant if he weren't.  There are more legal firearms than citizens in America.

Seventeen thousand murders last year -- 11,000 by guns.  Those other 6000 are worrisome, too. 

Is there anything new to be said here?  People like me, who have been shot by fellow citizens, might think it's obvious that ownership of guns – and ammunition! – ought to be regulated by the state, and people who are conspicuously mentally ill should be denied access to instruments of destruction.

But look at the individual words there.  Are we going to register butcher knives?  Deny gun ownership to anyone who's been to a psychiatrist?  Outlaw target practice except at government-controlled ranges?  Go out and register the 200-400 million guns already owned?

None of the above, of course.

The subhead story under the fold was "Mass killing one of worst ever in US."  The individual words there tell a story, too.  Only one of the worst, thank God, not the worst.

Something that's more in my territory, and only a little bit sad, was an interview with Eugene Cernan, who forty years ago yesterday walked up the ladder to zip up the Lunar Module and leave the lunar surface, the last man ever to do so.  Here's what he said to interviewer James M. Clash: 

“I honestly believed it wasn’t the end but the beginning,” said Cernan, now 78. He thought at the time: “We’re not only going back but, by the end of the century, humans will be well on their way to Mars.”

Funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a percentage of the national budget has declined. The U.S. is relying on Russia to fly to the International Space Station.

“We cracked open the door and threw out a plum to young men and women who followed us -- many far more capable -- and they reeled in a lemon,” Cernan said.

At least that door is not really closed, not forever.  Where there's life there's hope.

Joe