by Cecil Morris
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| A counselor attends to a grieving woman outside Geneva Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, Calif., site of a "politically-motivated hate incident" shooting which left a prominent doctor dead and another five people injured, on May 15. (Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/Getty Images) Photo illustrating “A weekend of violence punctuates generations of hate.” —The Washington Post, May 18, 2022 |
I am thinking that more people need more guns, many, many more guns in the hands of many more people, even young people, people too young to be trusted with books or ideas or facts or contraception or health care. If everyone has guns—both long and short and semi-automatic, bump-stopped and rapid-fire, with magazines large and small—then those bad guys with bad aims will be outnumbered and outgunned and no amount of metal-clad body armor will protect them. How else can we be prepared for the communists invading from Russia or Mexico or Cuba or Venezuela? How else stop the socialists spilling out from Blue States, flooding out from urban centers to America the Beautiful home of brave and unalienable rights. I am thinking Kid Rock or Ted Nugent or Lauren Opal Boebert or MTG needs to follow Dolly’s baby-book give-away example: a gun for every real American at birth and a new bullet for every month. I am thinking of growing libraries of arms borne and bared, of personal catalogs of destruction carefully curated and cleaned and oiled and mounted with laser-targeting sights so red dot marks the spot and shows us the way to heaven. I am thinking about teachers with guns and the indoctrination of students. I am thinking about ghost guns haunting America with our forefathers. I am thinking about women’s shelters handing out guns and incorporating target practice in their services, about Guns for Graduation, about CPS with guns and black plastic trash bags, about beaming girls at quinceañeras armed to the nines, about pistols in pews and a line of shopping carts with bullet-proof fairing and guns, about fortune cookie fortunes with guns in bed.
Cecil Morris taught high school English for 37 years. In his retirement, he has turned his attention to writing what he once taught students to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He has poems appearing in Cobalt Review, English Journal, Evening Street Review, Hiram Review, Hole in the Head Review, Midwest Quarterly, Poem, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.
