Entry 310: Joe Pancake

I will admit, I have been really struggling to find time to post to this blog the past month or so.  This is due to a few things, but the primary reasons are my young kids, my job, and the fact that I need to sleep more than three hours a night.  So once my sons grow up, I retire, and I start taking speed, I will have plenty of time!  Until then I will just have to make due with what I got, and this weekend it is not looking like I got much.  We are booked with toddler birthdays, dinner dates (i.e., meeting another family at Nandos), and personal training appointments (not me, my wife, but the obligations trickle down to me).

So it's three-and-out for me this evening.

1.  Yet another mass shooting.  Sigh.  I hate guns, and what I hate almost as much as guns are the pro-gun arguments of people who love guns.  They are, by and large, awful, simplistic, childish arguments.  I certainly don't have time to really get into it now, so I'll just take down one particular argument.  Every time one of these shootings happens a chorus of anti-gun control people pose some variant of the question -- "Don't you wish one of the potential victims had a gun to stop the shooters?" -- and I never like the answer people, even pro-gun control people, give.  So here is the correct answer:  A) It depends; B) The question is incomplete, and when you complete it, the answer is no.  

A)  If this fabled "good person with a gun" has training with a firearm and has battle training to handle stressful situations (e.g., a police officer or a soldier), then, yes, I do wish that.  If this person is some yahoo who thinks taking a little target practice with an assault rifle at a shoot range makes him (or her, I suppose, but usually him) Bruce Willis in Die Hard, then, no, I don't wish that, because they are just as likely to exacerbate the situation, than they are to fix it.

B)  Wishing somebody has a gun does nothing.  Somebody actually has to have a gun for the John McClane theory to work, and in order for this to happen, since these shootings happen at completely random places and times, this means almost everybody has to have a gun with them at all times.  Christmas party -- gun!  English class -- gun!  Taking your kid to school -- gun!  Get your wallet, get your keys, get your cellphone, get your gun!  And so the complete question to ask is -- "Don't you wish almost everybody carried a gun with them at all times so that we could stop mass shooters?" -- to which my answer is an emphatic "no!"  Mass shootings casualties might go down, but gun accidents would sky rocket.  Think about how irresponsible most the people you interact with are, now think about them guns.  Pleasant thoughts?

2.  Once upon a time, I was against gun control (but then I grew up -- zing!); I wrote an essay about it in eighth grade.  For the essay, we had to list 10 different sources.  This was back in the day, when sources were difficult to find.  They came from little cards in the library, not from Google.  I only had about seven, so I started making up names of authors and books.  I told my friend SH that our teacher wouldn't even check them closely, so to prove it to her, I put ridiculous names for the made-up authors.  One of them was Joe Pancake.  Years later, she reminded me of this, and we had a good laugh.  Since then I've adopted it on occasion as a pseudonym for commenting on websites (particularly crossword puzzle websites), and I've renamed my blog about crossword puzzles and Scrabble "Joe Pancake."  This is particularly relevant because I just published a puzzle at BuzzFeed.  You can read about it here if you so wish.  (And you can solve it here first, if you wish.)

3.  R.I.P. Scott Weiland.  I didn't really like STP when they first came out, because I thought they sounded like a bad Pearl Jam imitation, but I really grew to appreciate their music through the years.  I saw them in Newcastle, Australia in 2011 during their brief reunion, and I was half-expecting a money-grab, mail-it-in, we're-old-and-strung-out-now show, but I was pleasantly surprise.  They fucking rocked!  It was super fun.  Weiland's death surprises nobody, but it sad all the same.

Until next time...